How to value your company

There is a formula for valuing shares in companies.

                           Value = P/E x Future Maintainable Profit after Tax. 

Here P/E is called the price-earnings ratio and in the case of a listed company seems to average around 10.  If it was 8 then this means a shareholder would be happy to wait 8 years to get his money back or to put it another way is happy with a return of 12.5%. So the P/E is the inverse of the risk. (1/8 = 12.5)
The value of your company is greatly enhanced if you reduce risk (lower risk = higher P/E). 
And when accountants calculate the Future Maintainable Profit after Tax they only include repeat business. Windfall gains and stressful superhuman efforts are excluded.

So two identical companies making the same profit in the same industry could easily have quite different valuations depending on risk and repeat business. 

In general, businesses that rely on key individuals are worth a lot less than those that are structured properly and run by a reasonable manager with an eye on long-term relationships. 

This goes some way to explaining why private companies have a much lower P/E of between 1 to 3 which means that on average investors want a return of 50% to induce them to invest.

If we created the correct culture your business would be worth many times more. Reduce risk by half and double repeat business and your company is worth 4 times more.