Nine Things That Move Your Multiple (And Four That Don't)

Your multiple is a risk score wearing a maths costume. Everything that reduces a buyer's uncertainty about next year's cash flow pushes it up. Everything else is noise.

The nine that move it

1. Low, stable churn. The single biggest lever. Under 3% monthly is a genuinely different asset from 7%.

2. Revenue concentration under control. No customer over ~10%, no channel over ~50%.

3. Organic acquisition. Traffic you don't rent is worth more than traffic you do.

4. Documented, boring infrastructure. A standard stack a new owner can hire for beats a clever one they can't.

5. Verified numbers. Revenue straight from the processor and traffic straight from analytics remove the buyer's default discount for "maybe this isn't real".

6. Clean, transferable assets. Domain, repo, processor, and every third-party account in one place with no personal entanglements.

7. A trend. Twelve months of steady growth is worth more than twelve flat months at the same profit.

8. Pricing power. Evidence you raised prices and churn didn't spike is proof the product is needed, not just used.

9. Contracts, where they exist. Annual plans with real renewals beat month-to-month at the same MRR.

The four that don't

• Hours you put in. Nobody pays for your effort. They pay for the output that survives you leaving.

• The roadmap. Unshipped features are the buyer's upside, not the seller's price.

• Technology for its own sake. A rewrite in a fashionable framework is a cost centre unless it changed a metric.

• Total registered users. Signups that never paid are a mailing list, and should be valued like one.

What to do about it in the six months before you sell

You cannot fix churn in a quarter, but you can fix almost everything else on the list. Ranked by return on effort:

1. Connect your payment processor and analytics to something that can verify them. Cheapest multiple you will ever buy.

2. Write the operations doc. Every recurring task, every credential, every vendor. Two days of work, worth a fraction of a turn.

3. Move every account off your personal email and onto a business address you can hand over.

4. Kill or fix the one customer at 30% of revenue — either diversify around them or get them on a longer contract.

5. Stop shipping features and start documenting the ones that exist.

None of this grows the business. All of it raises what the business sells for, which is the only number that matters on the day you exit.