In addition to my full-time appraisal practice, I recently took on a new assignment, serving as a part-time instructor at a local university, something I have always wanted to do. This semester I will teach introductory macroeconomics, a survey of the U.S. economy and how it works.
Luckily for me, the course has been taught many times and the previous professor gave me her lecture notes. As I read them, I was struck by how technical they were: full of abbreviations, acronyms, and technical terms that by themselves would be incomprehensible to first-year students (and to some extent, to a 60-year old former economics major trying desperately to cram for his new teaching gig!) I am going to have to be sure to provide a great deal of careful explanation as I go along.
This also applies to business valuation reports. It is easy to (inadvertently) assume that a business owner knows a lot more than they really do about finance and valuation, and to confuse them by failing to explain important concepts. I tested this by rereading a recent report of mine, and was shocked to see that I had introduced the concept of a cash flow discount rate with no explanation at all! Shame on me, but I fixed that in my template.
Put yourself to the test: reread a report of yours and see if you can spot any undefined or inadequately explained terms. There is an art to this: we cannot be professors of valuation to knowledge-free readers, starting from ground zero and writing 500-page textbook-type reports, but at the same time we cannot be too cursory with important concepts that form the foundations of our conclusions.