System and method of succession planning for privately held small businesses

A method for estimating the enterprise value of a privately held company, the method comprising:

• producing an initial estimate of enterprise value of the company based on public data;
• developing a proprietary, statistically based valuation methodology to estimate enterprise values of private small businesses by industry/sub-industry;
• providing certain privacy and confidentiality rights to business owners to encourage owner validation and editing of private company information important to the quality of the estimated values;
• employing a quantile user interface methodology which enables users without full access to private data to estimate the value of an identified business;
• providing secure access to identified business owner to access, verify or correct their number of employees, annual revenue, and industry/sub-industry (NAICS code) and view their estimate of enterprise value;
• providing, via a user interface, a set of prescribed questions, each question having a plurality of prescribed answers, the plurality of prescribed answers being related to the company's assets, financial performance, geography, industry, and/other characteristics which add or detract from the company's estimated enterprise value;
• receiving prescribed answers from the plurality of answers to each question;
• modifying the initial estimate as a function of the received at least one prescribed answers to produce a modified estimate;
• publishing the modified estimate in response to a request to publish the modified estimate;
• and
• providing access to estimated values by prospective buyers or other authorized registrants and enabling such users to independently estimate business values using a valuation process and user interface similar to that provided to business owners as described above.