Meet Capitaliz – A Digital Platform Built To Help Private Businesses Accelerate Their Value

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Below is our recent interview with Craig West, the Founder at Capitaliz:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?

A: Capitaliz is a digital platform built for exit planners and advisors like accountants and wealth managers to help private businesses accelerate their value and successfully plan their exit.

Business owners cannot run their business forever. At some point, 100% of business owners will leave their businesses, whether planned or otherwise. And with more than 10,000 Americans reaching retirement age each day, there are many private business owners that are looking to exit their businesses. Except business owners have limited resources to value their business–it requires a lot of administration and time. Without advice owners are losing the value they created. Capitaliz was founded to help the 83% of business owners that have no written business succession or exit plan and confronts these challenges with a digital solution.

Created by exit and succession planning veterans, Capitaliz is built upon proven, proprietary methodologies to accelerate business value, minimize risk, and improve outcomes for private business owners. Our suite offers succession and exit planning insights including business valuation and identifying the ways to grow that value as well as guidance for mid-market clients paired with collaborative tools, automated recommendations, and administrative functions to help businesses maximize value and manage risk. We’re a global company headquartered in Sydney, Australia and we work with advisors throughout Australia, the UK, and North America.

Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?

A: We developed an economic indicator to assess the value potential of mid-market businesses and determined the most appropriate actions to take in order of priority that will most affect business valuations. Our Value Performance Index, or VPI, is informed by hundreds of business valuations conducted over the last decade and a half and includes economic, industry and business-based risk scores to determine profit gap, benchmarking, exit readiness, and attractiveness to determine business value potential. It also takes into account economic factors, industry trends, and business sentiment.

In the first quarter of this year, our analysis revealed a massive valuation gap of small and medium-sized businesses in America: these businesses are undervalued by $3.7T in aggregate.

The primary reason for the value gap is the absence or poor structuring of succession and exit plans. With more than 2.3 million private mid-sized businesses owned by the retiring Baby Boomer generation, we are currently witnessing the largest wealth transfer in history and Capitaliz estimates that by implementing effective succession planning, the combined value of these businesses could increase from $24.3 trillion to $28 trillion. This data is a massive red flag to the millions of business owners and entrepreneurs in the US. Further, these businesses, mostly in regional centers, pose a commercial risk to middle America and local communities in terms of wealth and job security.

Using the aggregated data across all businesses using the platform, Capitaliz is uniquely positioned to accurately predict value potential by business, by industry, or by country.

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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?

A: Capitaliz is a comprehensive offering, an end to end solution for maximizing value and achieving a successful exit. Accountants, lawyers, wealth managers, exit planners…anyone that works with private small and mid-sized businesses should be looking to Capitaliz.

Our platform uniquely combines financial, non-financial, and benchmarking data to provide a Business Insights Report, identifying the indicative and potential value of the business. These insights and valuation tools allow business owners to identify current valuation and key actions to accelerate business value. Capitaliz has proprietary methodologies to value private businesses, based on millions of exit-planning data points. The platform leverages a proprietary 21-step process which has been used for more than a decade with business owners to identify, protect, accelerate, unlock, and manage value in privately owned businesses by focussing on several factors including non-financial, financial, credit, exit readiness, industry benchmark, and ESG. The platform walks advisors through an implementation roadmap that automatically maps out an advisory engagement over 18 to 24 months to help private businesses accelerate business value and ultimately be set up for success with an exit.

We’re able to do this at scale as a digital offering and allow for an “apples for apples” comparison across industries because of our valuation algorithm, dataset and methodology.

There are a lot more features built into our offering such as collaboration and workflow tools for owners and advisors to maximize value and we are constantly enhancing the platform and developing additional features to support our users.

Q: What can we expect from your company in the next 12 months? What are your plans?

A: We are really energized by what’s in the pipeline in the coming year. We have a lot of great partnerships that we’ll be announcing that will bring Capitaliz to even more advisors in North America. In tandem, we are expanding our team in North America. We are also working on product enhancements that will benefit advisors and accountants on platform and private businesses including increased analysis focus on ESG.

One thing we’re especially excited about is the increasing number of conversations we’re having about tailoring our offering for financial institutions looking for consistency in evaluating mid-market private companies. For example, banks could look to Capitaliz as a pre-approval process and filter whether a private business is an appropriate candidate for a loan or other opportunity. Given our proprietary data and methodology, this offers institutions a very seamless way to scale those processes. There are a tremendous amount of ways that partners see extending our technology and we are really pleased with how the many applications are resonating within the financial community.

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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?

A: With our roots in Australia, we already have a passionate community of North American advisors accredited on our platform who genuinely believe this is a best in class product for business owners and advisors alike. Captializ is built ready to deliver outcomes now.