Can I price my business higher because I built it from nothing?

Not directly — the effort and sacrifice it took to build the business, while genuinely significant to you, isn't something a buyer is paying for, since they're purchasing the business's current earnings, assets, and future prospects, not its history or how hard you worked to get there. Two businesses with identical financials will be valued the same way by a buyer regardless of whether one took a decade of struggle to build and the other was inherited.

The nuance is that "built from nothing" sometimes correlates with real, legitimate value drivers, even though the effort itself isn't one — a business you built personally may genuinely have stronger customer relationships, better institutional knowledge, or more resilient processes than one acquired and run more passively, and those things do affect price. It's worth separating what's actually valuable to a buyer from what simply feels important to you because of the effort involved.

If you're tempted to set your asking price higher specifically because of how hard you worked, it's worth checking that reasoning against an independent valuation before going to market, since a price a buyer's advisors see as emotionally driven rather than evidence-based tends to slow negotiations rather than strengthen your position.