Almost 200 business valuation firms and practices responded to the BVR Benchmarking Survey, which closed last week. The survey, which has been conducted since 2007, achieved a 20% increase in responses over the prior version, so we thank everyone who participated!

Most of the respondents (60%) have business valuation as their primary business, while 23% say public accounting is their main business, with BV as a practice area. In terms of volume of engagements, there was a good mix of small and large practices, with about half of the respondents doing more than 50 engagements this past year and about a third doing one to 20 engagements. A few observations from the results:

• The fastest growing BV practice area over the past year was in the income, gift, and estate tax area, which 26% of respondents cited;
• For 2023, the three most profitable practice areas will be income, gift, and estate tax; M&A/transactions; and litigation support;
• Two-thirds of respondents say their BV revenue will increase in 2023 versus 2022;
• Only a third of respondents have annual billable hour targets for staff;
• Most respondents (83%) say they do not have any type of quality control metric for their practices;
• Half of the respondents say they currently have no staff shortages, but finding and keeping good professional staff is a critical factor going forward;
• LinkedIn is the social networking site of choice for 80% of respondents;
• Seventy-four percent of respondents use Kroll’s Navigator for estimating cost of capital, followed by 35% who use BVR’s Cost of Capital Professional (some use both);
• IBISWorld is the source for industry research for 60% of respondents, followed by RMA, at 52%;
• Webinars are the most popular form of BV training, used by 80% of respondents; and
• Very few (7%) use any type of third-party valuation report writing software.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of data and metrics collected from the survey. We are analyzing the results to complete the full report, and we will let you know when that is available. Also, BVR has partnered with leading business valuation, forensics, and litigation services (BVFLS) practice management expert Rod Burkert (Burkert Valuation Advisors), who helped design the survey and will use the results to identify the best practices of top-performing BV firms based on the metrics that matter the most. The idea is to determine what makes a good firm great.