The Value Triage Tool: Prioritize What to Fix First

The Business Emergency Room: For Leaders Facing Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity (VUCA)

Business valuation is more than a price tag at exit. It’s a running assessment of your company’s health, credibility, and resilience.

Maartje van Krieken shows how valuation can serve as a practical management tool for everyday decision-making. Drawing on lessons from mergers and acquisitions, she explains why external perceptions matter just as much as internal metrics and how they shape financing terms, customer trust, and even employee morale.

Using ten lenses, Maartje unpacks the questions outsiders bring to the table: Are people loyal to the business or just its leaders? Is culture sustainable beyond a founder’s presence? Do the numbers hold up under scrutiny? Would evidence convince a skeptic? This is operational due diligence turned inward, helping leaders stress-test their assumptions and identify the gaps that weaken long-term value.

Framed as risk-based prioritization, the process reveals not just what’s broken but where the biggest opportunities lie. A quarterly review through these lenses creates a roadmap for practical improvements that strengthen operations, safeguard against risk, and build value worth defending, whether or not a sale is ever on the horizon.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Business Valuation as a Daily Tool

02:18 Why External Evaluations Matter

06:03 Risk, Evidence, and Defensibility

09:55 The 10 Lenses of Operational Due Diligence

28:06 Risk-Based Prioritization for Strategy Reviews

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

The Chaos Games Consulting

The Business Emergency Room

LinkedIn

Substack

YouTube

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction.

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm