Opsist's brand promise is 10X Your Business. It is a statement of ambition and of method, not a guarantee, and the method rests on one piece of arithmetic that is worth setting out in full. Enterprise Value = Sustainable EBITDA x Market Multiple. Everything on this site about operations, capital, portfolios and exits is about moving one or both terms of that equation.
Why value compounds faster than revenue
Revenue is one number. Enterprise value is the product of three: revenue, the share of it that becomes sustainable EBITDA, and the multiple a buyer applies to that EBITDA. When only revenue grows, value grows at the same rate, at best. When margin also expands, EBITDA grows faster than revenue. When the business becomes higher quality at the same time, better reported, less concentrated, less founder-dependent, the multiple rises too. Three terms moving in the same direction compound.
This is the whole argument for building the operating layer of a business rather than only its top line. Operations are what expand margin and what raise the multiple. Sales alone touch only the first term.
The illustrative path
| Stage | Revenue | EBITDA margin | EBITDA | Multiple | Enterprise value |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $1.0M | 15% | $150K | 4.0x | $600K |
| 2 | $1.5M | 18% | $270K | 5.0x | $1.35M |
| 3 | $3.0M | 20% | $600K | 6.0x | $3.6M |
| 4 | $5.0M | 22% | $1.10M | 7.0x | $7.70M |
| 5 | $8.0M | 25% | $2.0M | 8.0x | $16.0M |
| 6 | $8.0M | 25% | $2.0M | 10.0x | $20.0M |
Read down the columns. Revenue grows eight times across the path. EBITDA grows more than thirteen times, because margin expands from 15% to 25%. Enterprise value grows more than thirty-three times, from $600K to $20M, because the multiple rises from 4.0x to 10.0x on top of the EBITDA growth. That gap between the revenue column and the enterprise value column is the arithmetic of compounding, and it is what the phrase 10X Your Business is pointing at: the operating work that multiplies value, not a promise about any particular business.
What moves each term
- Revenue moves with distribution, pricing, new channels, adjacent services and, in a portfolio, add-on acquisitions. Growth capital, used inside a plan, accelerates it.
- Margin moves with pricing discipline, procurement, shared services, operating technology that removes manual work, and the elimination of leakage that a monthly close makes visible.
- Multiple moves with recurrence, diversification, reporting reliability, documented process, reduced founder dependency, scale and the presence of a platform that can absorb further growth.
The limits of the arithmetic
The arithmetic is true by definition; the inputs are not. Margins in the illustrative path are assumptions and many businesses cannot reach them. Multiples are set by markets, sectors, interest rates and the buyers who happen to be present, and no operating work controls them. Revenue growth of this shape takes years and can stall or reverse. Stages are not calendar periods and businesses do not move through them in order. A business can execute well and still be worth less at the end than at the beginning because its market moved.
For those reasons, every financial figure on this site apart from the brand promise itself is labelled illustrative, and the brand promise is a statement of what Opsist works toward, not of what it delivers. Opsist does not publish client financial outcomes without written approval, and it does not guarantee any outcome. The 10X Plan page carries the interactive version of this path with editable assumptions; change them and watch how quickly the end value moves. That sensitivity is the central lesson of the model.
How to use the model
Use it to decide where to spend the next quarter of operating attention. If margin is the weakest term, the work is in procurement, pricing and shared services. If the multiple is the weakest term, the work is in reporting, documentation, concentration and founder dependency, and the quality of EBITDA note describes it. If revenue is the weakest term and the first two are sound, that is when growth capital and, later, add-on acquisitions are worth considering, in that order. The model does not tell a founder what their business will be worth. It tells them which lever they have been ignoring.