Is it normal for two valuators to disagree by a wide margin on the same business?

Some disagreement is normal — valuation involves professional judgment, not just plugging numbers into a formula, so two qualified valuators can reasonably land on somewhat different figures. But a genuinely wide, unexplained gap is less common and usually traceable to a specific cause: different assumptions about normalized earnings, including how much of your add-backs they accept, different comparable transactions used as a benchmark, or different views on risk factors like customer concentration or how dependent the business is on you personally.

The nuance is that a wide gap is a signal to investigate, not just accept or dismiss. Ask each valuator to walk through their key assumptions rather than just comparing the final numbers — often the actual disagreement is narrow, tied to a specific add-back or risk adjustment, even when the bottom-line figures look far apart.

It's also worth checking whether both valuators actually had the same information. A valuation is only as reliable as the financial records and context behind it, and a gap sometimes reflects one valuator working from incomplete information rather than a genuine difference of opinion. A business lawyer or accountant can help you reconcile the two before you rely on either number in a negotiation.