Agency valuation Apply

Publications

The thesis, in long form.

White papers and articles from inside the collective. The deepest version of the A27M argument lives here. New writing lands periodically.

Article8 min read

How We Value a Real Estate Media Agency

The actual math, in the open, because every buyer you will meet keeps theirs in a drawer

A million-dollar agency can hear three honest numbers in one week: 0.4x revenue from the shop across town, 1.7x on owner earnings from our model, 2.83x on EBITDA from a consolidator. All three can describe roughly the same wire transfer. Here is the math we use and where every number in it comes from.

valuation
selling
sde

Article9 min read

The Squeeze on the Middle

The floor came up, the ceiling came down, and you are standing in between

A solo operator with a subscription now delivers about eighty percent of your work at forty percent of your cost. Meanwhile a platform held us to $10,000 a month for seven months on a contract that auto-renewed, at a point when we were already hurting. Nothing in your business broke. The position it sits in did.

trends
ai
growth

Strategy8 min read

Paid Ads That Pay for Themselves

The Boosted Social Funnel, and the five steps that come before it

One video ad in the Seattle market produced 150 warm leads and $5,740 in fourteen days against a first $500 of spend. It was a boosted post that took about sixty seconds to set up, and it was step six of six. The five steps in front of it are what decide whether the money comes back.

strategy
acre-partner
marketing

Article9 min read

The Consolidation Wave Is Already Here

The call you got in January was not random

There is a buyer working through our industry right now paying about 2.83x earnings, and he runs twelve cold callers at four dollars an hour to find owners having a bad quarter. The agencies selling to him are not run by worse operators than you. They just took the call in the wrong month.

trends
consolidation
selling

Strategy7 min read

A Profile That Sells While You Shoot

Treat your Instagram as a landing page, not a portfolio

One month of a single assistant sending messages off an optimized profile produced 570 messages, 121 responses, 45 warm leads, and four booked listings. Nine times out of ten an agent checks your profile before replying, which is how a feed of nice houses quietly costs you the outreach too.

strategy
acre-partner
marketing

Article10 min read

Buying the Agency Across Town Without a Big Check

The math that lets consolidators buy your market works just as well in the other direction.

One advisor in our orbit came in on the exit of a nine-year private equity roll-up, and the whole effort returned about 9% a year. Buying the agency across town is still the cheapest growth you will find, and the structures that let consolidators do it without writing checks work the same in your direction. Just do not confuse it with getting rich quickly.

buying
growth
deal-structure

Strategy9 min read

Financial Management for Growth

Most agency decisions get made on a feeling, and the feeling is usually out of date

Ask an owner why they have not hired yet and you get: I do not think I have enough. Enough for what? The same decision with a number in it reads at $20,000 a month sustained, I budget $5,000 a month for a creative specialist, and now it is a checkpoint you either hit or you did not.

strategy
acre-partner
finance

Article8 min read

The Price Is Not the Payout

The headline number and the wire transfer are two different numbers

A $6 million offer can wire you $4.2 million on closing day, or it can wire you $2.4 million. Same business, same handshake, and $1.8 million of difference sitting in terms most sellers only read carefully after they have already accepted the price.

selling
deal-structure
exit

Strategy7 min read

Training Shooters in Sixty Days

How to build a bench that holds your standard when you are not on the shoot

By person eighteen, somebody forgets their Zillow camera at home. At one agency that got past this, a single creative lead trained eight specialists himself and the video lead trained ten to twenty editors over five years. Almost nobody there was trained by the founder.

strategy
acre-partner
team

Article10 min read

Clean Books Are Quiet Leverage

The most valuable work you will ever do on your agency is invisible until the day someone makes you an offer.

Due diligence runs $15,000 to $25,000 per brand and it is billed by the hour, so every month where the bank activity and the reported revenue do not line up is somebody's billable time. You pay for messy books twice. Once in the fees, and again in the discount a buyer puts on whatever nobody could verify.

selling
finance
exit

Strategy7 min read

A Team Foundation Before Headcount

The work that decides whether a hire succeeds happens before the job is posted

One creative missed a Matterport scan and went back to reshoot without telling anyone, so the agent walked in on a photographer at her listing she had not scheduled. That client was worth $35,000 to $50,000 a year and has been referring business elsewhere since. Nearly everything that decides whether a hire works happens before the job is posted.

strategy
acre-partner
team

Article9 min read

The Founder-Dependence Discount

If the business needs you daily, a buyer is not purchasing a company

Somewhere in the process a buyer will ask what happens here if you are unavailable for ninety days. On $600,000 of earnings, the honest answer is worth $1.2 million, because the same agency prices at 3x or at 5x depending on how much of it runs without you in the room.

growth
valuation
operations

Strategy8 min read

Selling Content Retainers

How to turn a client who books you per listing into one who pays you every month

Most agencies that try a content retainer quit inside four months, and it is almost never a demand problem. They sold ten reels for $2,500, which invites the client to do arithmetic on the units. Sell the second Tuesday and three hours of shooting instead, and the thing holds.

strategy
acre-partner
recurring-revenue

Article8 min read

Recurring Revenue Changes the Math

The same fix that solves January solves your multiple

An agency doing $3M at a 20% margin earns about $600K, and that same $600K sells for anywhere between $1.8M and $3M. Same clients, same crew, $1.2M of difference, decided mostly by whether the revenue arrives on a contract or has to be resold from scratch every thirty days.

growth
recurring-revenue
valuation

Strategy7 min read

Winning Brokerage Partnerships

You do not win these at the top, and you never win one once

One Coldwell Banker relationship ran over a hundred listings a month at seven to eight hundred dollars a booking. It took six to nine months to build, and the people who kept it alive were the office managers and marketing coordinators, not the broker who said yes.

strategy
acre-partner
sales

Article8 min read

The First Offer Is Not a Valuation

What a buyer is actually pricing when the call comes out of nowhere

A buyer offered me one million dollars for Aerial Canvas the year we did $4.3 million in revenue. That number said more about my situation than about the agency. An unprepared seller lands near fifty cents on the dollar, and the work that closes the gap happens years before the call ever comes.

selling
negotiation
exit

Strategy7 min read

Consult, Don't Quote

The fastest revenue in your business is sitting in bookings you never call about

A $250 drone job came in on an island listing with no structure on it. The consultation ran fifteen or twenty minutes, the project came out over $1,500, and it kept growing after that. The crew was driving there either way.

strategy
acre-partner
sales

Article8 min read

What Moves the Multiple

Same earnings, different price. The gap gets built years before anyone names a number.

Two agencies both cleared $600,000 in adjusted EBITDA last year. One sold for $1.8 million. The other sold for $3 million. That $1.2 million gap was decided two or three years before either owner ever took a buyer's call.

valuation
multiples
growth

Strategy8 min read

Pricing for Average Order Value

The revenue you already booked is the cheapest revenue you will ever add

One agency in the group raised prices almost 35% in July, told the list across three emails written as questions and answers, and two people out of thousands asked about it. The crew was already driving to the property, so most of that increase landed as profit.

strategy
acre-partner
pricing

Article10 min read

What Your Agency Is Actually Worth

The number that decides your exit is not on your P&L

Run $75,000 of personal and one-time costs through a P&L built for tax season and you have not lost $75,000 of value. At a 4x multiple you have lost $300,000, and the buyer who spots it before you do has no reason to raise a hand.

valuation
exit
finance

Strategy8 min read

The Irresistible Offer

Stop selling services and start selling the decision

Top producers pay an extra $200 a shoot because the agency carries a $7 million insurance policy and a team that picks up the phone. That is what an offer is. The photos are the same.

strategy
acre-partner
offer

White paper28 min read

The $27M Question

What Happens When the Best Agencies Stop Building Alone

A buyer offered one founder a million dollars for an agency doing $4.3 million a year. There was no number on the other side of the table to argue with. This paper is about where that offer comes from, and why private equity will not take the meeting under $3 million in combined earnings.

white-paper
thesis
valuation

Learn · A27M