Business valuation
< BLOG
Business valuation: The hidden disruptor
When people talk about what a business is worth, the conversation usually gets to turnover and profit quite quickly.
Fair enough. They matter.
But they are not the only things that give a business value.
A business has a name, a reputation and the trust of the people it deals with. Customers come back. Suppliers know who they are dealing with. People recognise the business and feel confident choosing it. That trust is built over time.
And increasingly, much of that sits online.
The value behind your name
Your business name appears everywhere: on your website, email signature, invoices, social media, proposals, advertising and the messages you send to customers.
Most people will not stop to analyse it. They will see the name, recognise it and make a judgement. If it looks familiar and professional, they are more likely to trust it. If it does not, they may go elsewhere.
That trust is earned over time.
You may have spent years improving your website, writing content, paying for advertising, gathering reviews and making sure people can find you online. You may have invested in design, photography, copywriting, SEO and paid campaigns. You have probably also spent countless hours responding to enquiries, solving problems and doing good work for customers.
All of that helps create a reputation and that helps immensely in a business valuation.
Then someone can register a name online that looks close enough to yours to benefit from it.
They cannot register your exact domain while you own it. But they may be able to register a variation: a spelling mistake, a missing letter, an extra word, a hyphen, or a different ending.
To you, the difference may be obvious.
To a customer rushing to make a payment, respond to an email or find your website, it may not be.
Hiding in plain sight
Not every similar domain is a problem.
It may be unused. It may have been registered for a legitimate reason. It may never be seen by one of your customers.
But it may also be used to make somebody believe they are dealing with your business.
That could mean a copied website, an email address that looks almost right, a false job advert, a fake enquiry form or an invoice sent from an address that differs by only a character or two.
The scam does not have to be sophisticated to work. It only needs to look convincing at the point someone is busy, distracted or already expects to hear from you.
And when it goes wrong, the person affected will not necessarily make a distinction between the real business and the person pretending to be it.
They may simply remember your name.
That is where the damage begins. A customer loses confidence. A supplier questions a payment request. A prospective employee believes they have been misled. An enquiry goes elsewhere and you never know it existed.
The business has done nothing wrong, but it may still carry the reputational cost and that shows up in a business valuation and a negative.
Continual exposure
At this very moment, most businesses do not know whether someone has registered a similar name online.
Many would not be especially concerned if they knew. Not because they are careless, but because they have not seen the risk first-hand. They have their own business to run. They are focused on customers, cash flow, staffing, suppliers and the hundred other things that need attention.
A lookalike domain is unlikely to feel urgent when it is only a registration somewhere on the internet.
The difficulty is that it does not need to be urgent when it is registered. It can sit there quietly.
It may never be used. Or it may be used months later, when someone decides it is useful for an email, a website or a message that needs to look more believable.
There is no automatic notification telling you that a variation of your business name has been registered. There is no obvious reason for a customer to tell you they saw it. You may only hear about it when someone has already been confused or misled.
That is what makes it continual exposure.
The genuine business keeps trading, marketing and building trust. At the same time, its identity can be copied or imitated in new ways outside its control.
The hidden disruptor
Larger organisations are used to thinking about this. They have security teams, brand-protection budgets and specialist tools that monitor for suspicious websites, new domains and impersonation attempts.
Most smaller businesses do not.
The available services can be technical, expensive and built around the needs of large companies. For an SME, the options have often been limited: spend more than feels realistic, try to check manually, or do nothing unless a problem appears.
But waiting for the problem to appear is the issue.
The earliest point to interrupt this kind of fraud is when the lookalike domain is registered. activated and turned into a copied website. Before it is used to send an email. Before a customer, supplier or applicant is put at risk.
That is why I built The TLD Project.
It came from a client experiencing a damaging lookalike-domain incident and discovering that affordable, practical help was difficult to find. Enterprise-level solutions existed, but there was little aimed at smaller businesses that simply wanted to know when something similar to their online identity appeared.
The TLD Project is designed to give businesses, groups and associations and their members that visibility.
Not to claim every similar domain is malicious. Not to create unnecessary alarm. But to make sure a business has the chance to see what is happening around its name, understand whether it matters and act before someone else discovers the problem for them.
I built The TLD Project after seeing how little practical help smaller businesses had to identify lookalike domains early, understand the risk and respond when action was needed.
If you work with SMEs, manage a business’s online presence or have seen this happen first-hand, feel free to call us to start this conversation.
