Beyond EBITDA: A Printing M&A Bootcamp

By Gabby Houck

This article originally appeared on the Wide Format Impressions website on Jan 7th, 2026

As M&A continues to be a major trend in our industry, Mark Hahn of Graphic Arts Advisors opened a value assessment bootcamp for printing and graphic communications owners at the 2025 PRINTING United Expo.

The session had a simple premise: value is not a single number, and it’s rarely as straightforward as “a multiple of Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA). Throughout his session, Hahn helped break down how buyers and sellers arrive at price — and, more importantly, how much a selling shareholder actually takes home.

“The true discussion when you get down to your value assessment and what your net shareholder proceeds are going to be is a much more nuanced conversation than just your EBITDA," Hahn said.

Hahn outlined three common valuation approaches:

• The cost approach: This asks what it would cost to replace the assets (similar to valuing a house by rebuild cost).

• The market approach: This looks for comparable transactions—difficult in printing because companies vary widely by size, mix, and profitability.

• The cash flow/income approach: The most common in M&A, this is often expressed as a multiple of EBITDA. He also reviewed valuation “levels,” ranging from fair market value (highest for profitable going concerns) to orderly liquidation, forced liquidation, and scrap—emphasizing that a company can be profitable yet still be worth more “in pieces” depending on circumstances.

  
  

A key distinction emerged early: enterprise value versus net shareholder value. Owners often quote enterprise value “I’m worth four times EBITDA”—but what matters is what remains after debt and other obligations.

 "Everybody wants to know what is my company worth? They might say 'I'm worth five times my EBITDA, what's my company worth?' But really what most owners want to know is the net shareholder value," Hahn said. "Say you have a value of $10 million in your company, but you owe $9 million of debt. Your shareholder value is only a million dollars."

While EBITDA is widely used because it standardizes companies with different depreciation schedules and enables faster comparisons than full discounted cash flow modeling, Hahn argued it’s frequently misunderstood. The real work is in refining EBITDA through adjustments or “add-backs” as he referred tot them, and interpreting what those numbers mean to sophisticated buyers.

He walked through typical add-backs such as auto expenses, certain insurance categories, excess owner compensation, and discretionary spending buried in marketing or “other” lines. The important nuance: owners cannot simply add back their full salary. In most cases, the add-back is the difference between what the owner is paid and what it would cost to hire a market-rate replacement. Rent can also cut both ways: under-market rent may reduce EBITDA rather than increase it, because a buyer normalizes real estate costs.

Read the full article HERE