Senior executives know that not all valuation methods are created equal. In our experience, managers dedicated to maximizing shareholder value gravitate toward discounted-cash-flow (DCF) analyses as the most accurate and flexible method for valuing projects, divisions, and companies. Any analysis, however, is only as accurate as the forecasts it relies on. Errors in estimating the key ingredients of corporate value—ingredients such as a company's return on invested capital (ROIC), its growth rate, and its weighted average cost of capital—can lead to mistakes in valuation and, ultimately, to strategic errors.

We believe that a careful analysis comparing a company's multiples with those of other companies can be useful in making such forecasts, and the DCF valuations they inform, more accurate. Properly executed, such an analysis can help a company to stress-test its cash flow forecasts, to understand mismatches between its performance and that of its competitors, and to hold useful discussions about whether it is strategically positioned to create more value than other industry players are. As a company's executives seek to understand why its multiples are higher or lower than those of the competition, a multiples analysis can also generate insights into the key factors creating value in an industry....