Most business owners rarely think about the value of their business. The day-to-day pressures of life leave little time to dream about the value of their business, let alone the factors that underpin a value improvement process.

Yet business value can be a very important concept. Value is critical:

• To enable a business to fund growth
• To attract and retain the best people
• To reward stakeholders
• To fund lifestyle, build assets and security
• To facilitate exit from the business on the owner’s terms and at a time that suits them

So, what are the key drivers of business value? Is it assets? Is it revenue? Is it the number of employees? Is it some accounting formula?

More than anything else, it is about profit. Profit is the backbone of every business valuation and the single most important thing for a business owner to focus on.  If a business owner can build their profit with strategies to sustain that profit into the future, they are building value.