Ask any business owner what their company is worth, and you’ll likely hear a number they picked up at a conference, borrowed from a buddy’s sale, or scribbled on a napkin using some multiple of EBITDA. Ask them how they’re actively managing toward that number, and the room usually goes quiet.
It’s a huge blind spot in privately held businesses. Owners spend years, even decades, building something valuable. Yet they operate without the one metric that could guide every decision: a clear, defensible stock price.
In a recent episode of the Best Metrics podcast, host Glenn Dunlap sat down with Michele Hammann, Chief Strategy Officer at SSC CPAs + Advisors. She’s a certified valuation analyst and author of Go Public in Private: A Strategic Blueprint to Go From Owner to Investor. The conversation explored the idea that every privately held business has a stock price, whether the owner knows it or not. And the businesses that calculate it, track it, and manage toward it operate completely differently from those that don’t.
Michele has spent more than two decades working with privately held companies, from family businesses to larger enterprises, helping owners shift from thinking like operators to thinking like investors. Her message isn’t that private companies should go public. They should adopt the disciplines that make public companies investable without giving up control.
Your Business Has a Stock Price. It’s Time to Find It
Your company has a quantifiable stock price right now, whether you’ve calculated it or not.
Michele knows this firsthand. Her firm, SSC CPAs, is 100% employee-owned through an ESOP, meaning they get a formal valuation every year. Every team member knows the share price. And that single number is the metric that connects daily work to enterprise value.
“You feel like maybe you can move a $50 needle easier than you can move a $5 million needle,” Michele explained. When you translate a multi-million dollar valuation into a per-share price, the concept of value creation becomes real. It’s a number your team can discuss the same way people talk about Apple or Nvidia stock prices.
So how do you actually calculate a stock price for a private company? Michele walked through it on the episode, and it starts somewhere that might surprise owners used to looking backward. “The market doesn’t buy what you’ve done. They buy what you say you’re going to do.”
The process begins with forecasted future cash flows, which the business can realistically generate going forward. You apply a discounted cash flow model to bring those future dollars back to present value. Then you check it against comparable transaction data, similar to pulling comps when selling a house. There are databases where business brokers log closed deals, searchable by industry code, region, and revenue size.
Interestingly, Michele describes value as a three-legged stool. First is profitability relative to peers. Second is cash flow and balance sheet health, i.e., how much cash you can actually pull from the business. The third leg is intangibles. “There’s a lot of soft side to increasing your enterprise value,” Michele noted. Things like management depth, customer concentration, and whether you produce regular financial statements all affect the capitalization rate used to value future cash flows.
Stop Watching the Scoreboard and Focus on What Moves the Needle
Michele shared a scenario every business owner should pay attention to: something goes wrong on the manufacturing floor on June 1st, starts eroding margins immediately, but the books don’t close until July 15th. “We’re 45 days behind a decision that could be made differently,” she said.
This is why financial results are lagging indicators. They tell you what already happened. Operational metrics, on the other hand, show what’s happening right now. They’re the leading indicators that actually drive financial results.
“It’s not 50 metrics,” Michele emphasized. “It’s finding two or three where you can marry that operational data with the financial data that really tells the story.”
She gave a perfect example from a coin-operated laundry company. Their biggest expense was machine repairs. So they track minutes per repair and minutes per swap. The technicians don’t need to know that each stop costs $40. They just need to know the target is under 15 minutes. That’s something they can control through better tools, having the right parts on the truck, and efficient restocking.
The same principle works across industries. In nursing homes, where labor is the largest expense, the key metric is nursing hours per patient-day. How many nurses are on the floor relative to the census? It’s something a floor supervisor can manage in real time, not discover six weeks later in the financials.
Michele described two approaches to finding the right metrics for your business.
- Bottom-up. Start with what you’re already tracking operationally and add the financial layer.
- Top-down. Benchmark your financials against peers, find where you’re underperforming, and trace those gaps back to operations.
Either way, simplicity is crucial. “You don’t want this to be where we have to get out an Excel spreadsheet and call four people to figure it out each time,” Michele said. If it’s too complex, it won’t stick.
Build the Accountability That Creates Value
Knowing your stock price and tracking the right metrics is just the beginning. What separates businesses that drift from businesses that compound is structure: the kind of structure that public companies are forced into and private companies get to choose.
First, forecast forward, not backward. Michele’s entire methodology is built on forecasts, not history. She compares monthly financials to forecasts, not last year. “They’re a different company than they were last year,” she explained. And consistently hitting or beating the forecast dramatically increases value.
Second, hold regular check-ins. Public CEOs do quarterly investor calls. Michele recommends private owners do something similar at least three times a year. “Sit down and synthesize what you’re hearing from suppliers, clients, and the market,” she said. Compare it to where you said you’d be and recalibrate.
Third, build an advisory board. Move beyond dinner table conversations or management team meetings where everyone has a vested interest. Assemble a mix of professionals from the accounting, legal, and banking sectors, plus fellow business owners. “Most business problems are just a form of something else that happened before,” Michele observed. “Someone at the table has probably seen your version.”
If you’re not ready for a formal board, Michele recommended starting with AI. Load your forecast and industry context into Claude and have it ask challenging questions quarterly. It’s not a replacement for human advisors, but it’s a legitimate first step.
Once you have a stock price and forecast, filter every decision through one question: Does this increase or decrease enterprise value? “It gives you a framework for decisions,” Michele said. “Is it perfect? No. But is it better than the absence of that information?”
It’s Not About the Exit; It’s About the Choice
This isn’t just about selling your business. Michele wrote her book specifically because too many conversations get reduced to “exit planning” when most owners aren’t ready to quit.
“Let’s frame this as growing to where we want to be,” she said. “Let’s just focus on growth and making sure you reach your goals.”
The discipline of knowing and managing your stock price improves everything from financing terms to family transitions, resilience against disruption, and the daily experience of running a business. “You never have to sell to an outside entity,” Michele noted. “But being ready is just good practice.”
Not every business needs to become a transferable enterprise. Michele shared a story about an audiobook producer who tried adding middle managers and discovered “this wasn’t fun anymore.” She went back to working directly with talent, knowing her business value wouldn’t grow significantly. “That’s a great decision,” Michele said. “Are you making good money? Are you happy? Are you having fun?”
The danger isn’t choosing to stay small. It’s arriving at the end of your career without ever making a conscious choice at all.
Start Where You Are
Every privately held business has a stock price. The question is whether you’ll calculate it, track it, and manage toward it or let someone else assign it when it’s too late to change.
The framework Michele laid out is practical and incremental. Calculate your enterprise value as a per-share price. Identify two or three operational metrics that actually drive value. Build accountability through forecasting, regular reviews, and advisors. Use value as your decision framework.
As Michele put it, “We identify what we know today, and then we just let our clients pick the next right thing. Just do the next right thing.”
This is a huge opportunity for advisors and CPAs. Most business owners have never been asked what their stock price is. The professionals who can lead these conversations move from compliance providers to strategic partners.
And if you’re an owner who decides building a transferable enterprise isn’t your path, that’s completely fine — as long as it’s a deliberate choice made with full awareness, rather than a default you stumble into.
You’re the investor. You get to grow at your own timeline. Just do the next right thing.
To learn more about Michele’s framework, listen to the full episode of Best Metrics.