Slee’s central contribution is the idea of value worlds: a private company does not have one value but several defensible ones at once, depending on the purpose of the valuation and the buyer in question, and the transfer channel chosen, family, management, ESOP, financial buyer, strategic, largely determines which world governs. Around that he builds a serious treatment of private cost of capital and of why middle-market returns and pricing behave unlike public markets.
The Institute’s reading: this is the book that explains why the question what is my company worth is genuinely ill-posed until to whom and for what purpose are attached, which is also why this Institute’s concierge refuses to answer it with a number. It is a textbook, dense and occasionally dated in its data, read for the framework rather than the figures.