Web 2.0 for the BV Community

TAGS:

By John Borrowman, CPC
Borrowman Baker, LLC, BV Staffing + Consulting
Gallatin, TN

Business valuation is a business of judgment. And one of the best ways to calibrate yours is to compare it to others’. But, how do you do that when professionals are scattered across the country? How do you ask the questions and get the answers that can help improve your work?

Welcome to BVWarehouse.com, the brainchild of Eric Oden and Jeff Kinderman, both with Oracle Capital Advisors in Tucson. (BV Warehouse is not affiliated with Oracle Capital.) Live only since June 2009, this Web 2.0 for the BV and M&A community is rapidly attracting users.

“I attend a lot of conferences and webinars,” says Kinderman. “The constant change in standards and regulation means that people have a lot of questions. Eric and I started BV Warehouse because there didn’t seem to be any place where people can get answers.”

The site (registration is free) lets users start, or reply to, message threads in BV, M&A or Litigation Support. BV discussions to date touch on a wide range of issues, including FAS 141/142, marketability discounts and option pricing, among others.

Oden and Kinderman both acknowledge there are a lot of different opinions and interpretations. But, by giving people a place where they can discuss those opinions, they feel they’re creating value for the industry. At the same time, they say, it’s important that people come to their own judgments based on what they read. To help, they have included a rating system for users to assess the quality and helpfulness of a given individual’s posts.

User feedback is already starting to come in and has resulted in the site being expanded beyond BV, to M&A as well. And, as with other Web 2.0 platforms, BV Warehouse is about creating community. Oden and Kinderman invite users to populate the calendar with industry events, and to make use of the “friends” and “groups” capabilities.

You never know where your next good idea is coming from. “Sometimes,” notes Kinderman, “I sit in a seminar and hear discussion about things that don’t really apply in my practice. And then there are other times when I hear something and I think ‘Wow! I wish I had heard that eighteen months ago. I would have been doing things differently all this time.’”

BV Warehouse can be a place where professionals share their experiences and knowledge with each other. The more that happens, the stronger the industry becomes.