Have the last six months changed the business valuation profession?

John Paglia (Pepperdine University), Robert Slee (Robertson & Foley), and the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University just published the results of their ongoing Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project, a research survey pertaining to privately-held companies and the markets in which they raise capital.

BVWire is happy to offer the following snapshot of some key factors specific to the appraisal profession.  This compares to similar data from Paglia and Slee’s project we reported here six months ago.

Comparison: Today Versus Six Months Ago

	Decreased	About same	Increased
Number of engagements	30.5%	28.4%	41.1%
Fees for services	25.5%	53.6%	19.9%
Time to receive payment for services	11.2%	53.8%	34.5%
Size of your BV department	14.7%	70.6%	14.7%
Cost of capital	23.9%	42.4%	33.9%
Market (equity) risk premiums	14.3%	47.7%	37.9%
DLOMs	8.1%	64.3%	27.6%
Company specific risk premiums	4.1%	43.8%	52.1%

Over 65% of the 252 BV respondents use the build-up method when determining the equity discount rate; and of those using beta, approximately 60% of respondents reported using an adjusted beta to calculate an equity discount rate. Just under 75% of respondents adjust the income stream to a “control” level when considering options for control adjustments, and the average control premium ranges from 15.4% on companies with $250M in revenues to 17.7% on $1M revenues.