How the business value estimator works

Pages are live for Florida, Texas, New York and Georgia: 1,032,595 businesses, as recorded in 2020 to 2021. Other states follow.

We list incorporated, for-profit businesses with at least one employee: LLCs, corporations, partnerships and professional associations. We leave out sole proprietors, the self-employed, independent contractors, non-profits and businesses whose name reads as a person's name. We also leave out businesses whose records suggest they may have closed.

A page shows the name, city, state, industry and staff size. Industry (a NAICS code) and staff size were reported by the business in 2020 or 2021 and may have changed. We do not show a business's own figures, street addresses or anything about the owners.

When a business trades under another name (a DBA), the page shows the trade name and gives the legal name as "Registered as". We remove labels that some records add to names, fix encoding errors and restore capital letters. The records allow 60 characters for a name, so a few long names end mid-word.

The rank compares a business's staff size with other businesses in the same industry and city in the same records. "#3 of 5" means two of the five reported more staff. It is a size rank, not a quality or revenue rank, and it needs at least five businesses to compare.

The ranges come from the loans used to buy existing businesses. The records show the loan, not the price. Buyers usually borrow about 85% of the price, so we divide the loan by 0.85.

We use purchases from 2023 to 2026, leave out loans long enough to include real estate, and group them by industry and staff size. A range needs at least 30 purchases; when the exact industry has fewer, we use the wider industry group and say which. The range shows the middle half of purchases.

A sale range describes similar businesses, not the named business. We tested estimates built only from public records against 2,023 real purchases: they were right on average but too far off for any one business, which is why no page puts a value on a named business.

Public records do not show a business's own revenue or profit. Pages show the 2022 averages for businesses of the same industry and staff size across the US: revenue, payroll and staff per business. They are labeled as averages and are not the named business's figures.

A valuation needs the business's own revenue, profit and owner pay. Anyone can value a business on Value Alpha from those numbers or from its statements; "Value this business" on a page starts with its name, location and industry filled in.

An owner can also claim the business's page by uploading one document that shows its name, such as a state registration or an IRS EIN letter. We review every claim; a verified owner is marked on the page, and the valuation can start while the document is reviewed.

A business that is not listed can be added by its owner with the same kind of document. Its page goes up once we have checked it, and it says when the owner added it.

Every page has a link to request removal. No account is needed, and a confirmed request is honored.