Perfecting your BV reports is a daily practice

In preparing their valuation reports, business appraisers may want to consider adopting “Kaizen,” the post-War Japanese practice of continuous daily improvement, said attorney Paul Hood said during BVR’s recent webinar, “The Business Appraisal Report: Perfecting the Art." A second path to improvement may be to “adopt a reviewer’s mentality,” added co-presenter Timothy Lee (Mercer Capital). “We may be satisfied, but with the stakeholder there is little that is convincing,” Lee said. “Lay the groundwork: own the basic facts and circumstances of the subject business,” Hood advised. And watch your writing style–“just say it so the reader can just read it,” he said.

Finally, when “offshoring” BV work is still a real threat to the profession, both presenters stressed using less “robotics”–fewer boilerplate forms and checklists. “We can easily gather data, but the future [of the profession] is how we differentiate the work product from someone else’s,” Lee said.