There’s a number that may decide whether you keep the CEO job—and it isn’t in your budget or operating plan. It lives in the underwriting created before you took the seat, and your board is already measuring your performance against it.

Your operating budget is bottom-up: what the team believes it can sell and what it expects to spend. The investor’s underwriting is top-down: what must happen for the people who wrote the check to earn the return they promised. Those two views rarely agree, and the CEO is the person who must reconcile them.

In this episode, Bill Canady uses a composite mid-market deal to reconstruct the board’s number live. He shows how entry EBITDA, entry multiple, leverage, hold period, target MOIC, and exit assumptions translate into required exit EBITDA—and how a single turn of market multiple can materially change the mandate.

You’ll learn:

• Why an operating answer does not satisfy a valuation question
• How to reconstruct the underwriting from documents you already have
• Why the conservative case should drive the operating plan
• How to translate an EBITDA gap into five levers: price and mix, cost, organic growth, M&A, and working capital
• What to put on the table at the next board meeting
• How this work fits into the first 100 days

Run your own number and download the report:
https://billcanady.com/lbo-calculator/

Better you find the number today than your board finds it in March.