B2B Information · Marketing · Technology
CEOs • Founders • Investors • Executive Teams
Practice Areas
Because every decision has a multiple
An operator-led benchmark and diagnostic for value creation and exit readiness.
Valuation is a lagging indicator. By the time a buyer prices your business, the decisions that set the number were made years earlier. For better or worse.
The Uphoff Value Index™ puts that number in front of you while it’s still yours to change. It benchmarks what buyers are paying for B2B information, marketing and technology businesses across eight categories, built from disclosed M&A transactions, the trading multiples of public companies in each category, and private-market buyer research. It then places your business inside its range on the factors buyers price: growth and margin read together, revenue per employee against category peers, and protection against AI disruption.
Built on 35+ years of operating experience, the UVI gives founders, CEOs and leadership teams a way to line up the decisions they make today with the value they want to create, and the timeline they want to create it on.
The UVI works on three levels:
The diagnostic covers five drivers that build value over time:
Where your market calls for it, we add a custom driver specific to your business model.
Every update to the benchmarks is reviewed by the UVI Review Panel, a group of operators, investors, investment bankers and industry analysts who work across these categories.
See where your business sits. To start a UVI engagement, use the contact form below.
Uphoff Value Index™ is a trademark of Uphoff Advisory, LLC.
Tools & Frameworks
Because every decision has a multiple
Framework Library
Plot your tolerance for ambiguity, against your appetite for exposure, so you know which leadership role you fit, before you take it.
Plot win rate against net revenue retention to find out whether you are actually winning, or closing deals an AI agent will unwind later.
A four-box test for which parts of your business survive an AI Agent standing between you and your customer.
About
Operating Philosophy
I believe every business exists to provide value for its customers. To best deliver that value, businesses need to evolve and transform, particularly during times of technology disruption. I've led businesses through three of those shifts myself: print to digital, digital to platform, platform to machine. I made good calls and bad ones, and learned from both. In every cycle, the leaders who got hurt focused on the environment they knew and lost sight of the customer they served.
That's where my philosophy starts: A myopic focus on the customer, followed by what I call the 4 P's: (People, Product, Process, and Performance). From there, 35 years of leading businesses through multiple transformations and several exits have helped me build a series of tools, systems, frameworks, and beliefs for building, running, and growing businesses, regardless of the era or market conditions.
I believe in the power of technology to better serve customers. Not tech for tech's sake. I believe my first job as a leader is to recruit, retain, and develop the best people I can find. I believe culture eats strategy for breakfast. I believe value creation lives in the day-to-day decisions you make. Not in a report before you sell. I believe in the power of B2B Information, Marketing, and Technology.
One of the most respected recognitions in media and business leadership, awarded for distinction in executive management.
At the height of the print era in B2B media — before the disruption that would define everything that followed.
Simultaneous disruptions: print collapse, platform shift, global recession. Led the business through all three.
Repositioned a legacy industrial directory as a modern digital marketplace. Anchored in 300+ Jobs-to-Be-Done interviews. Led to an unsolicited acquisition from Xometry.
Built a modern Demand-as-a-Service business from a carved-out unit. Improved EBITDA margins materially, grew international revenue.
Uphoff on Media
Six of eight B2B categories repriced this quarter, all of them down. AI exposure explains most of the moves, size explains the rest, and buyers now test AI defensibility before anything else.
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The buyer's AI is answering the three questions B2B marketing never did. Get them right and your value rises. Get them wrong, and it falls
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Most B2B companies run a third of a pricing process and call it strategy. Positioning, the part that turns price into value, is the part they skip.
Read the postWork Together