Method Lab · Aperture Analytics™ · Phase 02 Quantify
Three companies. One method. Completely different questions.
Below are three complete financial analyses, produced by the same workbench and published in full. One is a listed retailer with forty billion dollars of revenue and an audited 10-K. One is an owner-managed fabricator with eighteen million and a set of reviewed accounts. The third is a medical aesthetics group with six million, a compilation and no assurance at all, which is what most owner-run businesses actually hand you.
Read side by side, they make a point that is hard to make in the abstract: the analysis has to change when the entity does, and most financial analysis quietly refuses to.
The downloads
All three reports, in full
Nothing is held back and nothing is watermarked. Every figure carries the formula that produced it, and the final twelve pages derive every number in the report from first principles, so you can check the work rather than take it on trust.
Best Buy Co., Inc.
NYSE: BBY · C Corporation · Specialty retail
A listed retailer with three years of flat revenue and a gross margin that has barely moved. The analysis works out whether that is a market that stopped growing or a share position slipping, and shows why the recovery in returns is partly a shrinking denominator rather than a rising numerator.
- Audited statements, market-observed valuation
- Enterprise value, EV/EBITDA, P/E, free cash flow yield
- DuPont decomposition across four periods
- Break-even at 35,513 against revenue of 41,691
Meridian Precision Fabrication, LLC
Family owned · S Corporation · Contract manufacturing
An owner-managed fabricator compounding at 9.3% with a margin that holds. The analysis normalises the owner’s compensation, the related-party rent and the personal expenses out of reported earnings, then builds a valuation range, and shows exactly which add-back will not survive diligence.
- Reviewed accounts: limited assurance, no opinion
- Full normalization schedule with an evidence grade per item
- Adjusted EBITDA 2,715 · SDE 2,955 · intensity 30.5%
- Asking price implies 5.97× against a 4.0–6.0× range
Lumina Medical Aesthetics, PLLC
Founder led · S Corporation · Medical aesthetics
A three-clinic practice that grew revenue 61% in three years while profit stayed flat. The analysis finds the growth leaking out through patients who never come back, prices what the second visit is worth, and weighs fixing retention against opening a fourth location. It is also the weakest evidence base of the three: a compilation carries no assurance whatsoever.
- Compiled statements: no assurance, no testing, no opinion
- Reported EBITDA 878 to 966 against revenue 3,990 to 6,440
- Adjusted EBITDA 1,311 · margin compressed 22.0% to 15.0%
- Retention worth roughly 200 a year against a 900 break-even for a new site
Lumina is a fictional company created to demonstrate the Method. Every figure is synthetic and internally consistent; nothing here is a real client or a real result.
Open the illustrative exampleThe intake template
The workbook a private company is analyzed from
A private business files nothing, so there is no structured data to import — the analysis is only ever as good as what comes off the client’s own records. This is the workbook that collects it. Use it whether or not you ever engage us: it is a complete intake standard, and the checks in it will find errors in a set of accounts on their own.
Private company intake template
Excel workbook · 11 tabs
Company profile, the three statements, the add-back schedule, audit and disclosure intake, valuation inputs, a document request list to send the client, and a mapping reference for every line item. Yellow cells are the ones to fill.
- 38 live checks: the balance sheet, the cash tie-out, the retained-earnings roll-forward and every sign convention, tested per year before anything is imported
- Every label is the canonical one, so the mapping is right by construction
- Dropdowns for ownership, legal form and basis of preparation — the three fields that decide which comparisons the analysis is entitled to make
The same workbook, filled in
Excel workbook · worked example
Meridian Precision Fabrication, complete: four years of statements that reconcile, six normalizations each with its evidence graded, and the qualitative answers written out at the length they actually need. The fastest way to see what “good” looks like before you send the blank one to a client.
- Every check reads OK — the figures are internally consistent by construction
- Add-backs graded Documented, Estimated or Asserted, with the source named
- Illustrative figures; not a real company
Why it matters
The same ratio can mean opposite things
Most financial analysis is written as though every company were a listed one. It isn’t, and the consequences are not academic: they show up as a price, a covenant, or a decision taken on a comparison that was never valid. Three differences do most of the damage.
| What changes | Public company | Privately held |
|---|---|---|
| How much the evidence weighs | Audited under legal jeopardy, filed publicly, comparable period to period. | Reviewed, compiled or neither, and often kept on a tax basis rather than a reporting one. |
| Whether the tax line is comparable | Pays entity-level tax. Net margin means what it appears to mean. | A pass-through pays no entity-level tax, so net margin sits structurally higher than an identical C corporation’s. Compare on operating margin and EBITDA, or not at all. |
| What reported earnings represent | Management is salaried and separate from ownership. Costs are arm’s length. | The owner sets their own pay and rents the building to themselves. Reported earnings reflect a personal tax decision as much as the cost of running the business. |
| How value is established | Observed. Market capitalization, enterprise value, multiples read off the market. | Constructed. Normalized earnings × an evidenced multiple range, less net debt, and the range is the answer, not the midpoint. |
It isn’t public versus private that breaks the comparison. It’s tax status, and nothing in either set of statements warns you that the comparison has already failed.
From the Method appendix, page 29What’s inside
Forty-four pages, and no black boxes
Both reports follow the same structure. The last third is the part most analyses leave out.
Two things to know before you read them
Best Buy is real; its share prices here are not. The financial statements come from the published Form 10-K. The share prices and headcount are clearly-labeled illustrative placeholders, included so the valuation section demonstrates. They are flagged as such in the report’s own evidence ledger. Replace them with observed closing prices before quoting any multiple from that document.
Meridian is fictional. It was constructed to exercise the private-company path honestly rather than flatteringly: 30.5% add-back intensity, a 3.0% effective tax rate, and one add-back resting on management assertion that would not survive diligence. Its contact details use reserved example domains and numbers, so nothing in it can be mistaken for a real business.
Both reports carry an evidence ledger stating the source and confidence of every figure. That is not administrative overhead; it is the difference between an analysis a client can act on and an assertion they have to take on trust.
See your own numbers this way
The Business X-Ray is the entry point, a fixed-fee diagnostic that establishes where the business actually stands before anyone proposes what to do about it. Founder-led, in plain language, done for you.