How we estimate what your company's data could be worth

Short answer: the estimate starts from your headcount and years of history, then adjusts for your industry, how many systems hold records, how many kinds of work those records cover, how digital and how English they are, and your situation. The result is a range, labelled a Briggs Analytics estimate. It is not an offer. A buyer sets the final price after its own review.

What moves the range

1. People. Headcount is the base of the estimate. U.S. full-time staff count in full; staff outside the U.S. count at half, because buyers pay most for U.S. work records in English.

2. Years of history. The biggest single multiplier. Fifteen or more years of records in your systems is worth roughly nine times what under two years is worth, all else equal. Records only have value while they still exist.

3. Industry. Lending, insurance, software, cybersecurity, IT services and accounting sit at the top of the scale. Healthcare, retail, real estate and marketing sit lower. The difference between the top and bottom of the scale is about 30 percent.

4. Systems. Each system that holds records adds to the estimate: a help desk, a CRM, accounting software, code and engineering tools, job or project tools, an industry system, email and chat, or something you built yourself. Code and engineering history carries the most weight. The systems bonus caps at 60 percent.

5. Kinds of work recorded. Each kind (support conversations, sales pipeline, jobs and dispatch, invoicing and the close, projects, code and releases, contracts and case files, internal email and chat) adds 4 percent, up to six kinds.

6. Digital and English. Records that are nearly all digital and in English count in full. Mostly paper records count at half. Mostly another language counts at 70 percent.

7. Situation. A company that is winding down gets a small premium, because its records are at risk of being deleted and buyers move faster. A company that has already closed is adjusted by how much of its systems still exist: everything intact counts in full, exports or backups only at 60 percent, systems gone at 20 percent.

Where the numbers come from

The scale is anchored to what buyers publish. Several buyers of business data publish the ranges they pay, the company sizes they want and the years of history they look for, on their own sites. We read those pages, keep them under review, and set the low and high ends of our scale so a typical qualifying company lands inside what those buyers say they pay. News figures we cite, such as Google's $10 million bid for Spirit Airlines' records (Business Insider), are linked to their source. We don't publish which buyers we work with.

The range has floors and ceilings. The low end never shows below $10,000 or above $1.2 million. The high end never shows below $25,000 or above $3 million, and it's always at least 1.6 times the low end.

Three hypothetical examples

Made-up companies, run through the same math as the estimator:

• 80-person accounting firm. 12 years in QuickBooks, Salesforce and a support desk. U.S.-based, all U.S. staff. Briggs Analytics estimate: $380K to $920K.
• 35-person HVAC company. 9 years of jobs in ServiceTitan and invoices in QuickBooks. U.S.-based. Briggs Analytics estimate: $90K to $210K.
• 18-person software company, winding down. 6 years of GitHub, Jira and Zendesk history. Systems go offline in 60 days. Briggs Analytics estimate: $60K to $140K.

What the estimate is not

It is not an offer, a quote, a valuation of your business, or a promise that any buyer will want your records. Buyers turn companies down for reasons the estimator can't see: customer contracts that limit how records can be used, contractor code without an IP assignment, records that turn out to be thin. What buyers reject, and why.

If your estimate looks real, the next step is a review by us, by email. We'll tell you what we think your company's records could be worth and what we'd do next, and you decide.