It's Official: Sarah Gould, CVA

It’s official. I can add three new letters after my name: Sarah Gould, CVA.

Those three letters took more than 250 hours of training, studying, research, analysis, writing, a five-hour proctored exam, and a comprehensive valuation case study and report that was peer-reviewed. So naturally, my first thought when I finished was, “I am never studying again.” We’ll see how long that lasts. 😂

Now that I’m on the other side of it, though, I’ve found myself thinking less about the letters and more about what it took to earn them.

I’ve been doing this work for a long time. I’m used to being the person people come to with questions. I’m comfortable sitting down with a business owner, digging into the numbers, finding the story underneath them, and figuring out which levers we can actually pull. That experience gives me a lot of confidence, but I also think experience can make it easy to stay in the places where we already know we’re good. I never want to get so comfortable or so experienced that I stop refining my craft.

The CVA process stretched me in ways I expected, and probably a few ways I didn’t. Valuation is part numbers, part methodology, part research, and a whole lot of putting puzzle pieces together. You’re trying to understand not just what a business has done financially, but what is driving those results, where the risk lives, what makes the business valuable, and how all of those pieces fit together. That part felt very much like me. The studying for hundreds of hours? Slightly less like me. 😂

I’m a visionary by nature. Give me a new idea, a blank whiteboard, a problem to solve, or something we could build, and I’m all in. Starting things is fun. Staying with something when it’s no longer new, you’re 200 hours in, your brain is full, and you still have a report to finish is a completely different muscle.

And I had to flex that muscle a lot.

There were nights when I really didn’t want to open the material again. Things I had to read more than once, assumptions I had to question, work I had to redo, and plenty of moments when something newer and shinier sounded much more appealing. But I kept coming back to it. Somewhere along the way, I realized that doing hard things really is a muscle. Every time you flex it, starting the next hard thing feels a little less intimidating. More importantly, finishing it does too.

I think business owners can probably relate to that. So much of building a business is doing the work after the excitement wears off. It’s following through on the idea, having the conversation you’ve been avoiding, learning the thing you wish you already knew, looking honestly at what isn’t working, doing another round, changing your mind when the information tells you to, and, sometimes, just finishing what you started.

That’s growth too.

I’m incredibly proud to officially be a Certified Valuation Analyst. I’m proud of the rigor behind the designation, and I’m excited to bring an even deeper understanding of business value to work I already love doing. But I think I’m most grateful for the reminder that experience and growth aren’t opposites. You can be really good at what you do and still have more to learn. You can trust your experience and still question your assumptions. You can be confident and still choose something that stretches you.

And you can be a visionary who gets very excited about starting things and still become someone who finishes the dang thing.

So, 250+ hours later, I have some new letters after my name. But I think I built a little more grit along the way, too.

And I’ll take that with me long after I stop celebrating the letters.