A valuation number on its own tells you very little. A brand worth £4m, a customer book worth £6m, a technology stack worth £3m — these are facts, but they are not yet an argument. The question every reader of a valuation eventually asks is the comparative one: is that a lot? A £4m brand is impressive for a £20m business and unremarkable for a £200m one. The number only becomes meaningful when it sits next to the right peers. That comparison — your intangible asset profile measured against the businesses you are actually being judged against — is what Opagio Intangibles is built to provide, and it is the difference between a valuation you can quote and a valuation you can defend.
Benchmarking is not a vanity exercise. When a founder negotiates a round, a PE partner builds a value-creation plan, or an advisor positions a business for sale, the persuasive work is comparative. "We are worth this" carries less weight than "our intangible value sits in the top quartile for our sector, and here is where the gap to the leaders is." The first is an assertion. The second is a position. This article explains how the platform turns a single company's asset register into that comparative position.
The instinct, when benchmarking, is to reach for a headline figure: "intangibles are 90% of enterprise value." It is a useful conversation-opener and a poor measuring stick. That figure is drawn from the largest listed companies in the world, weighted toward technology and pharmaceuticals, and it tells a £15m UK services business almost nothing about whether its own intangible profile is strong or weak. Benchmarking against the wrong distribution produces confident, precise, and useless conclusions.
A real benchmark has to control for the things that actually move the number. Sector is the obvious one — a software company and a manufacturer hold their value in entirely different places. But size matters too, because the composition of intangible value shifts as a business scales, and so does stage: an early-stage company's value concentrates in technology and team, while a mature one's spreads into brand, customer relationships, and process. A benchmark that ignores these is comparing a sprinter to a swimmer and declaring one of them slow.
The benchmark is only as good as the comparison set. A single market-wide average flatters some businesses and unfairly penalises others. The useful question is never "how do we compare to everyone?" but "how do we compare to businesses like us?" — same sector, similar size, similar stage.
The platform's approach is to hold the business's own structured profile constant and vary the comparison set deliberately. Because every asset has already been classified against The Opagio 12 and valued with a named method, the same underlying data can be sliced against different peer groups without re-doing any of the work. That is the quiet advantage of starting from a structured register rather than a one-off valuation: the comparison is a view over data you already hold, not a fresh project.
Benchmarking intangible value is not one measurement but three, and they answer different questions. Confusing them is how benchmarking conversations go wrong.
| Layer | Question it answers | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| Share of value | What proportion of our enterprise value is intangible? | Founder narrative, board reporting, "are we asset-light?" |
| Driver composition | Where, across the 12 drivers, does our value concentrate? | Value-creation planning, gap analysis, diligence |
| Method inputs | Are the assumptions behind each valuation reasonable for our sector? | Defending a number to an investor, lender, or auditor |
The first layer is the broadest. It expresses intangible value as a percentage of total enterprise value and places that percentage against the sector distribution. A business that discovers 70% of its value is intangible, in a sector where the peer median is 55%, has a genuine story to tell — and one it can now tell with a number behind it rather than a hunch.
The second layer is where the strategic insight lives. Two businesses can have identical intangible shares of value and completely different compositions: one concentrated in a single licensable technology asset, the other spread evenly across brand, customer relationships, and process capital. The risk profiles are not remotely the same. Driver-level benchmarking shows not just how much intangible value a business holds but what kind, and how that mix compares to peers — which is precisely the analysis a PE partner needs before writing a value-creation plan, as we discuss in the PE exit use case.
The platform benchmarks the structure of value, not just its size. A business that is over-concentrated in one asset relative to its sector is carrying a fragility that a top-line valuation hides entirely. Composition benchmarking is what surfaces it — early enough to act on.
The third layer is the most technical and the most defensible. Every valuation the platform produces rests on inputs — a royalty rate for a brand under Relief from Royalty, a discount rate and attrition assumption for a customer book under MPEEM, cost components for software under the cost approach. Each of those inputs has a defensible range for a given sector. Benchmarking the inputs — not just the outputs — is what lets a founder answer the sharpest question an investor asks: "why is that royalty rate reasonable?" The answer is no longer "our advisor chose it" but "it sits at the sector median, and here is the band."
The benchmarking layer does not require any separate data-gathering exercise. It is a reading of the work already done in the four-stage workflow that runs every Opagio engagement, which means the comparison is available the moment the register is built.
The starting point is the Opagio Value Drivers Register™, the structured, dated output of guided asset discovery. Each asset in the register carries its driver classification, its valuation, and the method and inputs behind that valuation. That structure is what makes the business comparable in the first place — you cannot benchmark a free-text valuation report, but you can benchmark a register where every asset is tagged to a driver and a method. The register turns the business into a profile: a vector of values across the 12 drivers, with the method assumptions attached.
The profile is then compared to the relevant distribution — sector, size band, and stage. The output is not a single "you are above or below average" verdict but a position within a range: which drivers sit above the peer median, which sit below, and by how much. A business reading its own profile sees, at a glance, that its technology value is strong for its sector but its brand and customer relationships lag — the exact gap analysis that turns a static valuation into an action list.
Finally, the method inputs behind each valuation are checked against the defensible sector ranges. Where an input sits at the edge of its range, that is flagged — not as an error, but as a point that will attract scrutiny and should be ready to defend. This is the same discipline a careful advisor applies manually; the platform simply makes it systematic, so nothing reaches an investor or a lender unexamined.
A founder preparing a Series A had a valuation that leaned heavily on a single brand asset valued by Relief from Royalty at a 9% royalty rate. The benchmark flagged that 9% sat well above the sector range, which clustered around 4–6%. Rather than walk into the round with a number an investor would discount on sight, the founder revalued at a defensible 5.5%, then strengthened the narrative by pointing to genuinely top-quartile customer-relationship and technology drivers that the original brand-heavy story had buried. The round closed on the strength of a profile that survived scrutiny, instead of a headline that did not.
Founders use benchmarking to build a fundraising narrative that holds up under diligence. A claim about value is only as strong as its comparison set, and a founder who can show where their intangible profile sits relative to peers — and that the assumptions behind it are sector-reasonable — negotiates from evidence rather than optimism. The full version of that workflow is covered in our guide to building a defensible fundraising narrative.
PE partners and portfolio operators use it to find the value-creation gap. Benchmarking a portfolio company's driver composition against its sector shows where the business under-indexes — the brand that is thin for the category, the customer relationships that are weaker than peers' — and those gaps are the raw material of a 100-day plan. Benchmarking at entry and again at exit also evidences the value created, which is the story a sponsor tells its own investors.
Advisors and accountants use it to add a comparative layer to the valuations they already produce. A valuation delivered with a peer benchmark is a more persuasive and more billable deliverable than the same number delivered alone, and the benchmark is generated from the register the advisor has already built — no additional fieldwork.
Benchmarking is reusable, like the register it draws from. The same structured profile serves the founder at the round, the sponsor across the hold, and the advisor at every engagement. Build the register once; the comparison is available whenever the business needs to prove where it stands.
The shift benchmarking delivers is from a number to a position. A valuation answers "what is this worth?" A benchmark answers the question that actually moves a negotiation, a board decision, or a deal: "what is this worth, relative to the alternatives the other side is comparing us to?" That comparative framing is how experienced advisors have always argued value — the platform's contribution is to make the comparison rigorous, sector-specific, and available from the same register that produced the valuation in the first place.
Like every output the platform produces, the benchmark is decision-support, not a guarantee of price. The market sets the final number. But a business that walks into that conversation knowing exactly where its intangible profile sits — and which assumptions will be tested — is negotiating from a position the other side rarely expects from a company its size.
If you have not yet built a register, start with the Intangibles Questionnaire to assess your asset portfolio across the 12 drivers, then run the Intangible Asset Valuator walkthrough to put method-graded values against what you find. Once the register exists, the benchmarking layer compares your profile to the sector, size, and stage peers that actually matter — and the resulting position feeds directly into your board, investor, and audit-ready reports.
For founders raising, sponsors planning value creation, or advisors building a comparative service across a client base, the team runs working sessions that configure the benchmark for your sector and leave you with a position you can take into the room.
Mark Hillier is Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Opagio. Over more than 30 years as a senior commercial property advisor and growth leader, he advised major institutional clients including Legal & General, AEW UK Investment Management, and Salmon Harvester, and helped businesses scale nationally and prepare for successful private equity exits. He writes about how businesses position intangible value for growth and exit.
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