Category: Valuation of Businesses or Projects

The Money Value of Time


The National Audit Office building, built orig...
The National Audit Office building, built originally as the Imperial Airways Empire Terminal. The statue, “Speed Wings over the World” is by Eric Broadbent” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to page 2 of today’s UK Financial Times, a UK National Audit Office report shows over 6.5m people waited more than 10 minutes to get their calls answered by HMRC, adding £33m to customer’s phone bills and wasting £103m of their time last year.

This snippet of information triggered a few things that I wanted to say to you this morning. The first of these is, that, despite the fact that it is obviously pretty dire that people need to wait so long to get their calls answered by the service they are paying taxes to fund in the first place, at least in the UK there is a body which is concerened at the loss of time and places a value, in monetary terms, on that loss of time by the customer.

Anyone who has spent any time either in government offices, or even banks or supermarkets in this part of the world will probably confirm that the idea that the customer’s time is valuable and should be respected is a rather alien concept. Not so long ago it was an utterly alien concept, but even today it is still a concept which they find rather hard to grasp.

Not as bad as China, though, from what I heard and also saw. People being expected to queue all day outside the Chinese consulate for their visa and then at the very moment that the scheduled closing time of the office came the shutters come down like with Kiosk Keith and that was that. The spare time of the employees was utterly sacrosanct, that of the customer not at all. This of course shows an elitist mentality, which can be found in almost all state sector offices to one or another degree anywhere in the world. Expect it and try somehow to deal with it.

Much less acceptable is the wasting of the customer’s time in business. If the customer is paying then they have a right to have their matters expedited and people who keep people waiting ought either to invest in more infrastructure to avoid it or to wonder if they are in the right business. Continue reading “The Money Value of Time” →

Something to think about


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I think I’ll let the map speak for itself. It was the main story in the weekend edition of Rzeczpospolita newspaper.

Never make non-returnable down payments when buying a business.


I would like to tell you a cautionary tale, in which I may definitely not identify the parties involved and all I will say is it took place some years ago, somewhere in Eastern Europe.

A certain foreign investor, prior to coming to me for advice, had already down-paid a million on non-refundable deposit (so-called “vadium”) to the seller in order to be allowed to proceed with Due Diligence on an SPV containing a building he considered (although I disagreed with that too) to be worth a lot more. Let’s say five million. I’m hiding the actual transaction details in order not to embarass anyone, so five million is in fact correct, but the currency I’m using is fictional.

Well, needless to say, as ever I discovered plenty of question marks in the SPV, in fact SPV was not the correct word for this company at all. “SPV” means “Special Purpose Vehicle” and in real estate that basically means it’s there to own a building so as to allow some flexibility on the way of sale of a building and the choice with depend on the seller and buyer’s tax positions whether the building is sold out of this then empty company as an asset or whether it is sold in it’s corporate coating. There isn’t supposed to be anything else going on in an SPV. Well, there was in this one. Some proper monkey business, as we say in the trade. Although, in fairness, zoological supplies was about the only thing they hadn’t done. Among other things this company was holding shares in other entities which had been written off to a nominal value of one Euro in the balance sheet, but which under local law entailed liability for the owner and therefore had negative worth (of about five million Euro in total therefore nullifying the value of the Entity even if the building had been worth what the seller claimed and the buyer believed) It’s not easy by the way to spot such things using traditional audit methods. There’s a tendency to see no figure in the investments line on the balance sheet and then not even ask the question – but you have to ask it. Continue reading “Never make non-returnable down payments when buying a business.” →

Where’s the value in an Enterprise?


Metropolitan Life Bldg., Manhattan, New York C...
Metropolitan Life Building, New York City, c 1911 (PD from Wikimedia)

I was recently asked whether there was any value in a loss-making business that had had a good reputation for 30 years.

Put very simply, and almost as a philosophical maxim, the sum of the value of an enterprise is equal to the sum of the NPVs of its projects (including as one project the liquidating of its assets, if that’s what it has to do). If it has no projects, it has no value. If it has only or overwhelmingly negative NPV projects, then it has negative value. Even the case of Woolworths shows you that a name that we all grew up with cannot prop up negative NPV projects for long. Therefore the way to assess value is to make a business plan for all the projects based on assumptions analysed down to the smallest level logically appropriate, with values ascribed to those assumptions which are objective and as researched as possible, and then to run PV calculations on the business plan.

Sure, someone will come along and say “Hey, that’s too complex. What something is worth is what someone else would be willing to pay for it. This I know, for the IFRS tells me so” – but in the final analysis what that other person is willing to pay will only be based on what he thinks he can make from it in the terms stated above, less his margin for risk of buying it. No business person actually buys at the value in use, they want to make a profit on buying it at less than that, but their perception of the ultimate value should be based on the sum of the NPVs of the projects. Continue reading “Where’s the value in an Enterprise?” →