Anytime that you’re stipulating to something it means that you’re agreeing for the sake of the litigation to be bound by that number. If you do that without really looking into the business you may have stipulated to a value that’s either way too low or way too high and you may be forced to live with it. Most likely, you’re going to be forced to live with it especially if the other side said to you, “Here I have all – this everything that I know. I’m making a full disclosure to you.” You have that information but you don’t really understand what it means when it comes to value. For example, you may think, “Well, the business doesn’t really have any assets. I can’t see any physical assets.” But the business could generate quite a bit of income and that will impact what kind of valuation methodology the court would go with ultimately.

On the flip side, you could think, “Well, there’s no income,” but the business may have a lot of assets that will also impact how the court would value the business. The pitfall here is you don’t want to agree to something without really understanding what you’re agreeing to and a lot of people are very overwhelmed by experts and hiring lawyers and hiring experts. They don’t realize that you can hire an expert to say for $500,000.00 would you take a look at this a see is it even worth me pursuing. Is it worth doing a big valuation? And many of these experts will do what they call a quick and dirty review and look at it and tell you is it worth going on.