Method Lab · Aperture Analytics™ · Phase 02 Quantify
Two companies. One method. Completely different questions.
Below are two 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. The other is an owner-managed fabricator with eighteen million and a set of reviewed accounts.
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
Both 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 normalisation 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
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 capitalisation, enterprise value, multiples read off the market. | Constructed. Normalised 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-three 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-labelled 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.