Wealth management for the asset nobody manages
You have a wealth advisor for your portfolio. Nobody is managing the asset four times bigger.
Get your numberFree review · 40 minutes · if we find nothing, you are clean
Silent tax
Draining · activeTen rails of ordinary back-office spend. Not one of them big enough to argue about on its own. Not one of them repriced since the day you signed.
| Card processing | ~$18,000 |
| Payroll, comp, benefits | ~$12,000 |
| Insurance flagged only | ~$14,000 |
| Telecom, energy, waste | ~$13,000 |
| Property tax, freight, software, banking | ~$24,000 |
| Ten rails, trailing 12 months | ~$81,000 |
| Same money at sale · 4× EBITDA | $324,000 |
Enterprise value
Tier · uncommonHypothetical, illustrative.
Why those two panels are the same panel
No single line is worth a phone call. The stack is worth a quarter of a million.
That is the whole mechanism. Every one of those rails was priced years ago, by somebody who has since been promoted, at a company that has quietly adjusted the rate since. None of them is large enough on its own to make it onto anybody's list. Added up, they are the difference between the business you have and the business you think you have.
And every dollar you take back is earnings, which is the thing a buyer applies a multiple to. The Equity Anvil is a Texas advisory firm for owner-operated businesses between $1M and $25M in revenue. We hold the books, produce a dated number every quarter, and sit down with you to talk about where it is going. Then we work the whole back office, not one line of it, and keep working it.
The panel above is hypothetical and illustrative, sized to a service business doing about $5M. It shows the mechanism, not a prediction about you. Card processing is the one rail where we have a completed review to point to, at roughly $90,000 a year on $2.3M of card volume. Insurance is flagged during a review only. We do not place it and we take no placement compensation.
What the engagement is
A standing quarterly conversation, held up by real books.
Most owners get a valuation once, usually in the same month they decide to sell, usually from someone who has never seen the inside of the business. By then every decision that set the number has already been made.
We work the other way around. We keep the ledger, so the number comes out of primary financial data instead of a questionnaire you filled in. Then it gets recomputed every quarter, and every quarter we sit down and talk about the gap between where the business is and where you want it to be.
The number is not the product. The conversation is the product. The number is just what makes the conversation concrete.
The parts
The quarterly statement
Your position, what moved, and the ninety days in front of you.
Cost and vendor review
The ten categories where owner-operated businesses quietly overpay.
Bookkeeping
Near cost. Everything above it depends on the ledger being right.
The proof vault
Evidence kept current, so a sale could run in about ninety days whenever you want one.
Advisor coordination
Your CPA, your attorney, your vendors, working off one set of facts.
Before you hire anyone for this
Four things worth checking, including on us.
This is a category with very little quality control. These are the questions we would ask, and we would rather you ask them of us early than late.
They work from your actual books
Not a questionnaire you fill in about yourself. If the inputs are your own estimates, the output is your own estimates with a logo on it.
The scorer is not the scorekeeper
Whoever computes the valuation should not be the only party that produced the statements underneath it. Ask how that separation is handled. We use an outside methodology for exactly this reason.
They get paid the same either way
If the fee moves with the number, the number is not evidence. Ours does not. No percentage of value, no contingency on the valuation coming out high.
They are there every quarter, for years
Before the event, not summoned at it. The value of this work is entirely in having done it early, which is also why nobody feels urgency about it.
How we are paid
Two rails, both disclosed.
You pay us a monthly fee for the advisory relationship. Separately, when we move your spend to a better vendor, that vendor pays us. We would rather explain that now than have you find it out later.
Where you can check our work on your own statement, card processing, telecom, energy, property tax, we keep the vendor payment and show you exactly what it was.
Where you cannot independently check it, payroll, benefits, lending, we credit every dollar we receive back against your fee.
Start here
The review is free, and it is the least committal thing we do.
We look at what you are actually paying across ten categories of ordinary business spend and tell you what we find. If the answer is that you are already priced well, that is a real answer and it costs you nothing to have it.