July 18, 2022
This quick presentation overviews the system that has helped hundreds of advisors and thousands of businesses create intentional value.
Hey, there, Ken Sanginario here, founder of Corporate Value Metrics and developer of the Value Opportunity Profile software, or VOP as we call it. Thanks for stopping by to check us out today.
I’m hoping your time today will profoundly change the way you think about your career, as it has for hundreds of others in the last few years. The system and process that you’re about to hear about has been market proven to triple, quadruple, or in some cases, to 10X the business value of private companies.
It’s a process that has attracted some of the largest (and some of the smallest) advisory firms in the world … firms like RSM, BDO, and Morgan Stanley, to name a few. It's also a system that has attracted some notable investors, including the retired worldwide chairman of one of the Big 5 accounting firms, a top executive at Fidelity Investments, and some very successful entrepreneurs who were, themselves, past clients of our system.
If you currently practice in exit planning, turnaround management, M&A advisory, business valuation, financial services, or any niche where you’re advising business owners as your clients, this may be for you.
Now, you might already be asking yourself: Who is this guy and why should I trust anything he says? Well, good questions! You’ll have to get to know me a little more to trust me, but hundreds of others already have, and many of them have said that the process I’m about to share has changed their lives forever.
So, a little bit of my background might help. I spent 18 years, of my 40+ year career, turning around distressed companies for some of the largest private equity firms and commercial banks in the U.S., the likes of which included such firms as J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Santander, and a whole host of others. The rest of my career has been focused in corporate finance, business valuations, and M&A advisory services.
What I learned over the years was that each of these professional disciplines has its own separate and distinct knowledge base that can be super impactful on a private company. However, as valuable as each knowledge base is, nobody had ever combined them in way that each knowledge base could leverage the others, in a way that could put the power of all of them at the fingertips of any advisor. That’s the knowledge that we’ve combined into the software and process that we created. That’s the process that we’ve now been teaching in our Certified Value Growth Advisor (CVGA) program for seven years, to hundreds of very seasoned advisors who wanted to elevate their practices. Many of them have come from other countries because they couldn’t find anything like this anywhere else in the world.
What made me want to create this process in the first place? Well, at the peak of the 2008-2009 recession, my turnaround partners and I were getting a lot of “assessment” engagements from the workout groups of some of those big banks. They were getting flooded with companies getting pushed into workout and they needed help triaging the influx. Our mandates were to go spend a couple weeks in the field, interview management, assess the company, and deliver a report to the bank with our conclusions. We were doing a lot of assessments, but one day I had an “AHA” moment. These assessments were taking us way too long to complete because we didn’t have a standardized approach. Our fees were capped at flat rates per engagement, so we weren’t making enough profit. We were spending too much time writing reports and not enough actually solving the problems for the banks and the companies. And, lastly, our practice wasn’t scalable because of all the above reasons.
We needed a system that would solve our issues in the way we provided services. I took on the challenge to search for existing systems, software, tools, anything that might help us. I looked high and low but didn’t find anything that was worthy of the quality that we wanted to deliver. We’d have to build our own. So, again, I took on the challenge to build a prototype that would bring all of those knowledge bases together, collaborating with functional experts and industry experts to build a really powerful assessment and value creation software platform.
At some point along the way, the teacher in me realized that what we were creating needed to be shared with the advisory world, because it was simply too good to keep to ourselves. So, I decided to go all the way and build it into a cloud-based platform. So, after several years of intensive field testing on live companies, conducted in collaboration with a U.S. Department of Commerce agency, the MEP, we launched the Value Opportunity Profile software in 2014. Since then, we’ve continually released new editions, new features and functionality, and built a whole community of independent practitioners.
If you’re finding your practice in the same place as I found ours back in 2009, spending way too much time writing reports and doing administrative work, not enough time creating value, not making enough profit, not finding any software platforms that can uphold your standards of quality or move the needle in your practice, if you’re not enjoying your work the way you used to because of all these issues, then you’ve come to the right place. If you want a new way to grow your practice, to truly create value for your clients, to regain some work/life balance by being much more efficient, to make more money in less time than you ever have, then you’ve come to the right place.
If you’re feeling a little skeptical of the unknown, maybe some discomfort in trying something totally new, maybe some anxiety about providing a service where you don’t feel like the total expert yet, or any of a variety of other reasons why you shouldn’t change your practice, not to worry. Those are all common fears and reluctancies, but they all quickly fade away for those who take the time to explore and learn more about this process and how easy we’ve made it to use.
Our mission here at Corporate Value Metrics is to create value. We do that by equipping our VOP Community with the knowledge and tools they need to go create value for their clients. Now, business value can be defined and measured in different ways, but we measure the “intrinsic value” of companies, which Warren Buffet has described as the value that a seller would “get” in a transaction, versus the “price” that a buyer would pay. The late, great, Shannon Pratt, godfather of the business valuation industry, also taught that any other measure of a company’s value must be reconcilable with the value of its cash flows … its intrinsic value. The great thing about intrinsic value is that it’s controllable by the business owners, whereas transaction value, or price, is often wildly volatile in the market.
How is intrinsic value controllable, you might ask? Well, intrinsic value is a function of the sustainability, predictability, and transferability of future cash flows. Is there a sustainable business model, a sustainable organization, in a sustainable industry? Is there a predictable business cycle, a predictable customer base and a predictable cost structure? And, has the intellectual knowledge of the company been institutionalized across the organization, so that the business success is not solely reliant on the owner? These attributes represent the quality of cash flows, which drives the value of those cash flows.
Our premise in developing the VOP was that we could utilize the M&A due diligence knowledge base to measure the quality any company’s future cash flows at a granular level, by evaluating all the underlying factors that impact that quality. We could use the turnaround knowledge base to generate a prioritized roadmap of how to strengthen the company, and we could utilize the business valuation knowledge base to measure the company’s quality and risk profiles before, during, and after, any contemplated improvements are made, and the resulting impact on the intrinsic value of the company.
What we discovered, however, was that advisors using our system were seeing their clients transform in ways we never anticipated, and creating value beyond even our expectations. This was changing lives … for our advisors and for their clients.
People like Vincent Mastrovito, who had a successful wealth management practice before adopting the VOP system, has found so much success that he left his wealth management practice behind to focus exclusively on helping clients create value. He says this has changed his life. Kate Matz sees the power of the VOP concepts applying not only to her clients but also to her firm as they grow. Companies like Boston Baking, which has doubled in revenue in the last 3 years because of the VOP system, Pepper Palace, which increased its value by more than 10X to $70M+ and a successful sale, to Fourstar Connections, which created $6M in new value in 6 years and successfully sold to a strategic buyer, have all experienced the impact that the VOP system delivers. These are only a few examples of the advisor and company testimonials that have been rolling in as the VOP process gets adopted and executed in the marketplace.
When we started developing the VOP, we knew it could help us improve the value of our clients by helping them be more methodical about building their businesses. But, after so many advisors have had so much success with their clients, we had an epiphany. Business value, as it turns out, can actually be manufactured, just like any product can be manufactured. It’s not only controllable, it’s outright manufacturable! You need a clear vision of what you’re trying to create, it needs to be designed and engineered, you need a recipe of key ingredients, a disciplined process with continuous improvements, and, if it’s all executed relentlessly, the output is new value. It’s actually no different than what companies already do, whether they manufacture products or deliver services, they know this process and they “get it”. It doesn’t mean it’s easy to execute, but the concepts are easy to understand and, with focus and discipline, the execution can be mastered in the same way they already do it for their products and services.
If you think about it, private equity firms have known this for decades, but they’ve kept it to themselves so they could buy low, create value, and flip the companies for huge profits. Why should they be allowed to capture the largest amount of value that companies can create? Shouldn’t the founders and owners of companies realize that potential value? Shouldn’t we, as their advisors, help them to do so? And, if we do, won’t our fees reflect the value we’re helping to create? Yes, Yes, and Yes. It’s time for all that untapped value in companies to be captured rather than left on the table.
One of the big challenges in the advisory world, in general, is that most advisors are niche experts ... a foot wide and a mile deep in their expertise, and unable so see the whole picture for their clients. These advisors all need new engagements to succeed. So, they’re always in a “selling” mode, trying to convince company owners that they need their service more than anything else right now. Company owners, hearing the same pitch from a dozen different advisors every week, don’t believe or trust anybody because they feel like they’re being “sold” and it's all just noise to them. Furthermore, they don’t want an army of niche experts that they have to manage.
What they want, and need, is one highly valued advisor whom they can trust to help them see their business in a more holistic manner and guide them to allocate their efforts and resources in the right places, in the right sequence, with the right level of intensity, and with just the right experts, if needed. Becoming that most valued advisor is a total game changer for you, your practice, and your clients.
However, unless you’ve run companies from the inside and learned all the levers that need to be pushed and pulled, you’ll never know exactly how to be that advisor or how to create value. You’ll never see the whole picture of a company and understand its strengths and weaknesses enough to make a huge difference.
You need a guide of your own, a framework to follow. You need a repeatable system, just like my partners and I needed a repeatable system in our turnaround practice back in 2009. You need a system that is sophisticated, easy to use, market proven, scalable, and versatile. You need a system that can leverage the knowledge bases of turnaround management, business valuations, and M&A due diligence, and put it all at your fingertips in a seamless way. You need a system that will allow you to be more efficient, more impactful, and more profitable in less time, so you can maybe handle more clients or maybe spend less time working. The VOP is your guide! It’s your repeatable system! It puts all the knowledge into a framework that your whole team can easily leverage.
So, if you don’t already have all these knowledge bases in your head, you can either go spend a few decades in the field to gain the knowledge and build your own system, or you can adopt the system that’s already created for you. Our VOP system, and our CVGA program have been designed to give you all that you need to succeed. Decades of experience, a market proven system, compelling client results, and life changing transformations for many advisors
Maybe you’ve heard of Justin Goodbread, a very successful podcaster and financial services advisor, who adopted our VOP system and became a CVGA. He says we changed his life by helping him understand and serve his clients in ways he never previously could. Based on his new expertise, Justin has now gone on to join the large wealth management firm of WealthSource to lead the development of a new value creation services advisory practice. That’s the kind of transformative success that the VOP system can help generate. Of course, you may be happy in your current practice but just want to be more effective, more profitable, and less stressed. That part is easy … guaranteed.
There are many benefits to becoming part of the VOP Community. Having a consistent, efficient, scalable process, forming deeper relationships with your clients and making a greater impact on their businesses, differentiating your services, making more money in less time, and putting the fun back in your practice, to name a few.
You also get the benefit of a growing global community of like-minded practitioners, who are always ready to collaborate, to share ideas and best practices, and to make a more meaningful difference on their clients.
The market need and opportunity for these types of client services are wide open and growing rapidly. Now’s the time to get involved and be on the cutting edge of this whole new client service segment.
Some of the features that have been carefully developed in the VOP include a standardized diagnostic questionnaire, but not just some superficial questionnaire. The VOP questionnaire has been designed with extensive input from functional experts across its 8 primary categories, which are rooted in the science of DISC for business and developed with an M&A due diligence perspective. The VOP also includes different editions of the questionnaire for different industries, and different tiers for different sizes of companies.
The financial module of the VOP is a sophisticated discounted cash flow application that’s rooted in the valuation methodology. The inputs are easy but the back end is sophisticated so you can get the highly credible valuation results without being a valuation expert.
The VOP scenario planning function allows you to easily point and click contemplated improvements to the weak areas of your clients to instantly see the impact on value that can be achieved if the improvements are executed. The turnaround management methodology guides you to craft the most effective implementation program for your clients so you make the biggest difference in the shortest amount of time.
The VOP reports are automated, but easily customizable, so you’ll only spend a fraction of your time on the reports, leaving much more time to help your clients improve.
Perhaps most importantly, with the VOP, and with the CVGA training, you have access to live support and a portfolio of video training, tools, templates, and an online community of other practitioners to share ideas, ask questions, learn best practices, and collaborate on engagements. You simply won’t find these offerings with any other system in the market.
So, how do you get started? Visit us at corporatevalue.net and reach out to our team through any of the icons to request more information.
We’ll get back to you quickly, answer all your questions, and get you set up and running when you’re ready. As always, your subscription to the VOP and your CVGA training are guaranteed.
If you’re not satisfied with your new knowledge and tools, we’ll work with you until you are, or refund your subscription. However, the much more likely scenario is that we’ll feature your story in a future video about how this changed your practice and your life.
Thanks for watching and we hope you’ll join our Community soon!
We'll keep you updated on future courses, new content, and networking opportunities!
