Buyer-Led Valuation Webinar with Adam Smith

​Paying a price that only works if everything goes right is not a valuation discipline. It is optimism with a spreadsheet attached.

​In this session, Adam Smith — a Managing Director at Valuation Research Corporation with over 20 years of valuation experience, including stints as a Practice Fellow at FASB and Technical Director at the IVSC — breaks down the mechanics of buyer-led valuation. This is not a primer on DCF theory. It is a practical look at the decisions acquirers actually face: how to separate what a business is worth on its own from what it is worth to you specifically, and how to identify which synergies you are effectively giving away before you even get to the table.

​What You'll Learn

• ​How to separate standalone intrinsic value from strategic value — and why conflating them is how buyers overpay
• ​The three questions every acquirer must answer before anchoring to a price
• ​Which synergies are already priced in by the market (and which ones you actually get to keep)
• ​How to build a valuation range, not a single number, and use the spread as a negotiating tool
• ​When and how earnouts bridge a gap — and the three ways they go wrong post-close
• ​How sellers adjust EBITDA and why those adjustments can skew your comp analysis if you are not paying attention

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