Best Practice: Hire the Best Firm, Not the Closest

Once upon a time all of our service providers were local, weren’t they? Of course, times are changing. With the advent of modern technology, we live in a really flat world.

So does your valuation professional need to be in your town? Absolutely not. Unlike real estate where value is driven by an asset that is physically connected to the earth, business value is primarily driven by intangibles. Things like assembled workforce, convenience of location, brand and corporate image, client relationships, and more. All of these things come together to effectively drive ongoing cash flows, and ongoing cash flows drive value. Can we observe and analyze these things without being your friendly neighbor? Absolutely.

Considerations on Valuation Expert Location

Scale and Experience result in accuracy and efficiencies. We have a big valuation practice. We work on hundreds of assignments every year in about every imaginable industry. Local practitioners typically lack scale in their practice to get really good at valuation work. They also typically lack economies of scale, resulting in higher pricing for lower quality of work.

Technology Investment.  We are heavily invested in state-of-the-art technology. Our practice is fully digital and paperless. On one hand that helps us take data security extremely seriously. On the other, it results in a very “low friction” relationship with our clients. All of our interactions for document delivery and review are conducted in secure, modern, cloud-based file storage.

Site Video and Photos.  We do like to get photos and videos of your company. We’ll typically ask you to shoot us some pictures or videos of any facilities and upload them to our secure servers.

Local Presence.  Sometimes we do have to put feet on the ground. We have the capability to put feet on the ground in all fifty states within 72 hours for site reviews. We don’t charge extra for this–it’s already built into our pricing.  That said, you can imagine that if you’re like a lot of companies these days that are primarily people and desks, there’s not a lot to be said for a site visit!

Video Interview.  C’mon, don’t be camera shy! Something that’s been super successful for us is working with you through video conference.  We’ll share log-in information and you can even log in via your mobile phone for a video interview. The process is seamless but it really does help connect the dots when we are working with remote clients.

Bottom Line – the nature of professional services is changing rapidly.

The expectation that we are working with folks local to us becomes less and less important when we consider that we can access a higher quality experience for a competitive price who happens to be located a state or a time zone away.   Our experience working across the country–from Alaska and Hawaii to Puerto Rico too–only serves to drive this point home on a daily basis.