Working with a team means being a team first

What do you mean the team members from your outsourced firm aren’t learning your models and reports? The whole point of adding new team members is for them to join the team—not just wander off into left field.

Your business has its own processes and workflows, and your support team should be using those tools to help you deliver top-quality services and grow. The models and methods at most business valuation firms are the products of years of development. They do what they are designed to do.

Any outsourced firm worth its salt should adapt quickly and easily to your firm’s models, full stop. If they say they can’t and prefer to use their own, you’d be right to question the team’s skill and training—not to mention its culture. Any well-educated, well-trained, and experienced business valuation analyst should have the flexibility to use whatever model their partners prefer.

Additionally, if a partner firm doesn’t have its own model or lacks confidence in its current one and wants to try a new approach, a solid outsource firm should have a reliable model ready to go. Having seen and worked with numerous models from other partners, the outsource firm likely already has a really, really good model.

Red flag warning: If the outsource firm you’re partnering with pulls out another company’s proprietary model and offers to share it with you, this is a bad sign. The ship is not tight. What the outsource firm can share with you are the best practices and ideas they’ve observed—that’s it.

The teams at Assurent Advisors are happy to use their partners’ models, and their backgrounds and training give them the flexibility to integrate seamlessly. If you prefer to use ours, that works too. Our models are Best-Of compilations, thoroughly annotated so you don’t have to wonder what’s going on or why. If we use your model but you’re interested in making improvements, we can help with that as well.