Book excerpt: Determine a company's value, what drives it, and how to enhance value during a M&A Valuation for M&A lays out the steps for measuring and managing value creation in non-publicly traded entities, and helps investors, executives, and their advisors determine the optimum strategy to enhance both market value and strategic value and maximize return on investment. As a starting point in planning for a transaction, it is helpful to compute fair market value, which represents a “floor” value for the seller since it by definition represents a value agreed upon by any hypothetical willing and able buyer and seller. But for M&A, it is more important to compute investment value, which is the value of the target company to a strategic buyer (and which can vary with each prospective buyer). Prepare for the sale and acquisition of a firm Identify, quantify, and qualify the synergies that increase value to strategic buyers Get access to new chapters on fairness opinions and professional service firms Find a discussion of Roger Grabowski's writings on cost of capital, cross-border M&A, private cost of capital, intangible capital, and asset vs. stock transactions Inside, all the necessary tools you need to build and measure private company value is just a page away!