Everyone knows that in baseball, you don’t hit a home run every time you go to bat – but what you can do is advance runners with singles, doubles and triples or even sacrifice fly balls and bunts. Getting to home plate requires intelligence, talent, hustle and knowing what each of your players is capable of doing.

The same can be said in business –  you may have the potential to reach home plate, but only after you’ve invested a lot of time, energy and good old fashioned hustle. The more runs you score, the more wins you have, the greater the value of your team. Whether you are considering buying, selling, merging or running the company for another ten years, you should know the value of the company – and it’s something many mid market owners and CEO’s don’t know.

So how do you determine the value of your company? How do you get from here to there?

First, start with the here!

Baseline your enterprise or to put it another way, get a solid handle on getting an honest, impartial assessment of your business. This means checking out the good parts and the bad parts – leaving anything out of this examination will hurt you in the long run. And the biggest challenge in determining where “here” is will be finding that competent, honest broker.

So where do you begin?

I suggest that you go to an outside source to conduct this discovery. Why? Because you want someone who does not have a vested interest in your company. An outsider can see things you can’t, because you’re too close to the business.

In addition, having a third party with no financial interests in the business itself will help your leadership team, and their direct reports, have a greater buy in to findings, and how best to fix those that are not so positive.

There are a number of very good valuation companies out there.  They are normally accredited through NACVA, the National Association of Certified Valuation Analysts.  On the flip side, there are also a number of companies that will provide a valuation with very little knowledge of your market segment or very little to show in the way of credentials.  Do your homework or even drop me a note and I can at least tell you the valuation firms I like.

So before you start your planning process and developing initiatives that will take you to the next level (wherever that may be), get a handle on where ‘here’ is … look for the valuation professionals.

The result of this baselining exercise is that you and your team know where “here” is – and then you are on your way to determining the steps you have to take to get to “there”.