InterVal with Trevor Greenway | E192

Transforming business valuation from static to live.

On today’s episode, Jason is going to talk to Trevor Greenway Founder and CEO of InterVal. It is a dual-sided platform that is predicated on the democratization of valuation. The company believes that business owners and their key advisors deserve to have access to key metric and the leading indicators that are driving it at all times. 


Episode Highlights:

  • 01.06: Earlier, Trevor was in consultancy for about 11 years. The entire model is predicated on helping business owners earlier in the process, making any less of an emotional readiness type decision and something where they can be more proactive. 

  • 01.39: During the consultancy stint, Trevor found out that the commoditization of advice regarding accounting and banks is driven by when can I bring value at a specific point in time? But that specific point in time was usually too late 

  • 02.20: It was just through the manual process as a consultancy that Trevor and his team began developing automated tools. 

  • 03.35: At some point, you may be thinking about the exit or how much the business is worth or fill forms that say your business’s worth. Everybody is really operating in this giant black box without constant feedback about the market value. They are most probably the largest asset they have is. 

  • 05.13: Trevor talks about the awareness of one’s overall financial health. As result, they thought it was always backwards that the value of one’s business, which first SMEs is typically their largest asset is the black box that no one is aware of, so they are making contributions in the form of growing their business trying to invest in certain elements of it, so they are doing that part. 

  • 07.15: Trevor explains what ultimate KPI is? He advises one needs to where they stand today, and then it is that measurement over time, and its implications on all of the other advisory relationships, whether that be tax planning, insurance, wealth advisory, or funding financial planning. They are all integrated, and we have to be able to educate the business owner and their advisors around this key metric. 

  • 09.02: For those that have not yet converted to the role of cloud accounting, which allows Trevor and his teams to regularly extract that accounting data upon which to provide regular analysis to update valuation provider evaluation at onset and other key metrics and qualitative. 

  • 11.09: Trevor explains how they have numerous KPI metrics and analyses to tell the consumer how they are doing it. Things like current ratio, inventory ratio, inventory turnover, then benchmarking that against like industry. 

  • 13.02: Trevor built a proprietary algorithm based on history. They took dozens of due diligence processes and deconstructed them into common areas where prospective purchasers will look at the end regardless of how far you are away from leaving. 

  • 15.00: Business owners understand the qualitative factors that, while they may not directly impact the valuation, they impact the risk factors associated with that valuation.

  • 16.14: Trevor explains how their job is to create a discovery mechanism for those looking to deliver value.

  • 17.01: Your financial statements are not entirely indicative of your free and clear cash flow, so you think the easiest example is you have a business owner who is either overpaying or underpaying themselves relative to what it would cost to replace that skill set, says Trevor.

  • 20.00: Trevor explains how they want to help business owners; once they understand that, they talk about that end state. 

  • 22.02: Explaining ripple effect Trevor says it doesn’t just impact the business owner. It doesn’t just impact their account, and it has an impact on their legal structure. It has an impact on their tax planning. It has an impact on their financial plan, and their insurance products assessed that they that are necessitated to protect them. 

  • 25.23: If you want to deep dive and learn more and learn as much as you want, but in a matter of minutes, you can get what you need, and balance between compact complexity and simplicity in this space is will probably remain a challenge.


3 Key Points:

  1. Trevor narrates about his corporate journey and how he developed automated tools. They built a tool for their own internal purposes; once they built it, a bunch of people wanted to license it.

  2. Trevor explains how they are tapping upon other databases of publicly available information on transactions to come to that based on industry. 

  3. Jason talks about the two types of investors. The strategic buyers who basically just want to be involved, and then there are investment Buyers who just want to own the business and essentially have no operational need to run the business. Then there are ones who actually want to run the business. 


Tweetable Quotes:

  • “It is our goal and our mission to help business owners and their advisors create awareness.” - Trevor Greenway

  • “Everybody is working in a giant black-box without constantly knowing the market value.” - Jason Pereira

  • Everything else that they do from a financial planning perspective is so critical. If you set a financial plan based on something that was wrong and then never revisited again, it is like a broken clock, except it was never right a second time.” - Jason Pereira

  • “We pull APIs from cloud accounting data/” - Trevor Greenway

  • Our system concurrently runs three models - capitalized earnings, capitalized cashflows. and book value approaches on every business.” - Trevor Greenway

  • “You are doing things that others aren’t that is impeding your growth.” - Jason Pereira

Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech