What is a business actually worth? Although it is deceptively simple, this may be the most important question you can ever know as a business owner or an advisor. Despite this, the vast majority of business owners have no idea what their businesses are actually worth. In fact, only 2% of all businesses around the world have valued themselves properly.

The concept of "business valuation" has grown in popularity and infiltrated both the mainstream financial media and the Main Street, as personal investors and professionals alike discuss the recent value of private shares in Uber and other private company Unicorns.  While it may seem like fun topic to debate around the office, you needn't worry about these incredible forces of nature, you should start asking that question for yourself or your clients or prospects businesses.

The 200 million+ small businesses that shape the towns, industries, countrysides, and high streets don't have white shoe investment banks like Goldman Sachs or stock exchanges like NASDAQ's new Sharespost enabled exchange to price their business.  Instead, 98% of these businesses are unaware of their value.

Why? Because the old offline method was too expensive, too time-consuming, and much too intrusive. There was no automated, online, big data-enabled way to expedite the process or democratize the knowledge.

An up-to-date valuation strengthens owners and entrepreneurs at every stage of their journey, from growing their business, to raising debt or equity capital, and finally when deciding to exit. 

But as the age old saying goes: “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.” Business owners cannot expect to know their value if they do not take the necessary steps to find out. The result: businesses may be left undervalued, inadequately insured, and underfunded.

To put this into context, you wouldn't plan for retirement a month before you retire, so why would you wait to value your business the month before you sell?  For many entrepreneurs this may be reason enough – but there are plenty of other scenarios that might just entice business owners to discover their worth.

For many businesses, having knowledge is increasingly important, as we anticipate a climate in which small businesses will be treated no differently from their larger counterparts. Going forward, with loans likely to be issued based upon a myriad of more relevant factors than personal wealth and credit ratings alone, as well as online lenders growing at a ratio of five to one against traditional banks, businesses are increasingly more likely to require an unbiased third party valuation.

The upshot is that valuations and credit decisions will go hand in hand – and businesses will have access to finance based on what they are really worth, rather than a largely arbitrary assessment of an entrepreneur’s personal finances. Further, businesses armed with an accurate independent valuation put themselves in prime position to attract external investment.

Until now, there has been software to address every need of a company except for helping to answer the most important question every business owner or entrepreneur should know - "What is my business worth?” 

Thanks to the transformative power of Big Data – vast volumes of tiny, purposed data insights on a particular set of questions – obtaining accurate and reliable online valuations has become a reality for all. Businesses can now ascertain their worth at a tenth of the cost of traditional valuation services, and in a fraction of the time, making the intrusiveness of more traditional methodologies a thing of the past – and what a game-changer that has proven to be. 

By helping business owners discover, monitor, and optimise their business value, new levels of performance can be achieved.  Partnerships with financial institutions and FinTech providers will become a reality.  Better tailored financial products with a level of transparency and shared risk can now occur.  In short, the good news about the "Uberization" of things may not actually be a nascent company trying to pitch how they are like Uber, but rather, bringing a topic of discussion to the forefront.  Whether Uber is worth $55billion or $43.5 billion won't change its prospects in the long-term - as they have hit a grand-slam by creating an entire new market - but knowing your value can help you get to first base.