When I was a young business appraiser, or well, when I was a new but not so young business appraiser, the valuation of illiquid minority interests involved developing a base value for a business and then applying two big discounts, a minority interest discount (MID), and then, a marketability discount, aka DLOM. This post is about the first, now disappearing, minority interest discount.
The levels of value chart is one of the most important descriptive figures for business valuation. In a previous post, we gave names to the “spaces” on this chart, which are familiar valuation discounts and premiums used by business appraisers. This post focuses on why those “spaces” exist and the economic factors that create the familiar discounts and premiums.
The genesis of what we now call the Integrated Theory of Business Valuation was my 1997 book, Quantifying Marketability Discounts. That book introduced the Quantitative Marketability Discount Model (QMDM) to the business appraisal profession and focused on shareholder level cash flows. The QMDM was, and is, a shareholder-level discounted cash flow model. In my 2004 book, The Integrated Theory of Business Valuation, we focused the integrated theory on valuation at both the enterprise and shareholder levels of value. Then in 2007, we released Business Valuation: An Integrated Theory, Second Edition and the third edition was released in 2021. It’s evident that the integrated theory has been around now for many years. In this week’s post, we begin to relate the integrated theory to the standard of value known as fair market value.
A question was posed in a recent issue of Business Valuation Update from BV Resources. Paraphrasing, if all shareholders are minority, should there be a discount for lack of control (from the marketable minority level)? The broader question is, whether all shareholders are minority or there is a controlling shareholder, should there be a discount for lack of control (from the marketable minority level)? The answer is the same as we conclude in this post.
In this second post on the New York case Friedman vs. Beway, we look at what happened at the Supreme Court (the lower court in New York) in Beway to inform what happened at the Court of Appeals.
