There will come a time for business owners to start to entertain the idea of ownership transition. In one way or another, they will have to transfer their businesses to the hands of other owners, carrying over not only the business itself but the employees as well. Shina Culberson, chartered financial analyst of Quist Valuation, talks about the processes of valuation and how businesses can drive value. She covers the importance of creating a culture of innovation among employees starting with the customer mind rate. Sharing as well how they lower the barriers of entry to valuation, Shina provides some actionable and deliverable information to business owners as she shares her business journey.

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How Businesses Can Drive Value During Ownership Transition with Shina Culberson

We are so fortunate, we’re in the world headquarters of https://www.quistvaluation.com/ (Quist Valuation )with the President, Shina Culberson. Shina, thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for having me.

Tell us a bit about your business and who you serve?

We are a business valuation firm. Many people don’t know what that means. To make it very simple, what we do is we work with primarily privately held companies and/or family-owned businesses to help them understand if they were to go on or sell their company, what could they sell their company for. What is the dollar value of their company? We work mostly with privately held companies and they can range from anywhere from $2 million in revenue to a billion dollars in revenue. We believe that looking at a broad breadth of clients across various life cycles makes us better at what we do. It provides us contexts when we look at different companies in different industries.

Folks would say, “What makes you qualified to go out and do this? What brought you to business valuation?”

Business valuation experts are also called business appraisers. There is a credentialing involved. I personally hold the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with. It’s quite a rigorous designation to obtain. We here at Quist actually support all over our analysts receiving that designation. We hold it in the highest regard. We think it stands out amongst many different designations within the industry. To be qualified, you need to work with somebody who has experience or this is something that they are doing on a full-time basis. I have many friends who are CPAs. They’re very good with numbers like we are, but they’re not necessarily qualified to do business valuation. There are a different financial theory and techniques involved. Finding someone where they’re doing business valuations as their full-time practice would be an important qualifier.

The understatement was that the CFA is a hard thing to get. It’s a very narrow funnel. Very few people come out the other end in the CFA. Then you’re also doing credit analysis for a major investment firm, I believe, in your previous life.

I’ve been an analyst my entire career. I graduated from college with an Economics major and had an Asian Studies minor. I spoke Japanese. I lived in Japan for a little while. My first job was at a Japanese bank in Los Angeles. I started out as a commercial banker. I probably was one of the last people to go through a formal credit training program sponsored by a commercial bank. I moved into asset management with Charles Schwab Investment Management. I covered the international markets. I did credit research for them. That was a fascinating time because I covered financial institutions so I was there when the Euro was launched. I was in Europe talking with the central bank, talking about lender of last resort across Europe. I was around when there was the Russian ruble crisis.