A New Community for Business Valuation

My name is Rod Burkert, and as the Welcome message on the sidebar says, I’m a co-founder of Burkert Valuation Advisors, LLC.

I began doing business valuations in the mid-1980s. Back then, I worked for two publicly traded banks during a heady time for M&A. Most of my valuation training came at the heals of Wall Street investment bankers – reverse engineering their valuation models to learn about P/E ratios, growth, and earnings accretion and dilution.

In 1995, I went through NACVA’s training and came away with my CVA. Then, I got an invite to join NACVA’s training development team and began teaching others about business valuation. Those were heady days, too, because it was fairly easy for one motivated person to learn “all” what he/she needed to know about business valuation and then continue to stay on top of new developments in the field.

I started my own valuation firm in 2000 with the support of two industry stalwarts, Mel Abraham and Michael Kaplan … I felt like I was part of The Three Musketeers! Running my own shop taught me a lot about business valuation – cash flow was no longer an abstract term or spreadsheet calculation, but a monthly reality.

Today, the days of “jack of all trades, master at none” – if not gone – is something we pursue at our own peril. There’s a need to focus our practice efforts and sharpen our technical knowledge.

I am launching Standard Of Value to provide Valuation insights for business owners and appraisers.™ My hope is for this blog to be a clearinghouse for what’s old and what’s new in the business valuation community … a venue for conversations about business valuation and related issues that we all run into in everyday practice.

As time (and blog posts) goes by I hope you’ll chime in with your views in the Comments section.