Most businesses never sell. This is why.
Between 70 and 80 percent of businesses that go to market never close. Not because the market was tough. Because buyers found structural problems the seller never fixed and priced them accordingly.
The Valuation Gap is written from the other side of the table. After signing over 100 NDAs, accessing data rooms, normalizing financials, and working through SBA financing on deal after deal, Muriel Touati kept finding the same problems in every business she evaluated: founder dependency, client concentration, revenue that didn't hold up under scrutiny, and financials that collapsed once a lender ran their own numbers.
This book is what every business owner should read before going to market. Not to present their business better. To build it differently.
What You'll Learn:
- Why 70% of businesses never sell and what they all have in common
- What a 6-8× EBITDA multiple looks like, reverse-engineered from the buy side
- How add-backs inflate valuations and why lenders dismantle them
- Why cancel-anytime contracts are not recurring revenue, regardless of what the broker calls it
- The founder dependency discount: calculated, deliberate, and non-negotiable
The distance between what founders expect and what buyers will pay is created years before the business goes to market. Every chapter includes a Buyer's Lens Diagnostic, a scored self-assessment showing exactly where your business stands on the criteria buyers and lenders actually evaluate.
Who This Book Is For: Service business owners who want to understand what buyers and lenders actually look for, whether you're planning an exit or simply building a business that could run without you.
The founders who exit at a premium built differently and started earlier than most.
Learn more at exit3dstudio.com or connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/murieltouati
About the Author :
Muriel Touati is the founder of Exit 3D Studio, a New York-based growth and exit strategy firm that helps founder-led service businesses build toward premium valuations, from the buyer's side of the table.In 2025, she shifted her focus to acquisitions, signing over a hundred NDAs, accessing data rooms, submitting letters of intent, and working through SBA financing on deals that revealed the same structural problems, again and again. That experience became the foundation of The Valuation Gap.A French entrepreneur based in Manhattan since 2021, Muriel previously built L'Accélérateur LinkedIn, a training program for independent consultants across Europe. She is still looking to buy a business, and hosts a bi-weekly gathering for entrepreneurs in New York.
Review :
"This is more than a transaction book. It lays out the full map of what should be measured and managed when buying or selling a business - and doubles as a roadmap for how every business should be run day to day. The same disciplines that make a company sellable are the ones that make it well-run. It bridges the gap between an MBA and ten years of the school of hard knocks, without wasting your time." - Carl Fillihan, Founder
"I've read several books on buying and selling businesses, but this is the first one that gets into the nitty-gritty of why some deals make sense and most don't. Fantastic. I already see myself recommending it to a lot of people." - Ian Mayer, Founder
