Episode 63

The Value Triage Tool: Prioritize What to Fix First

Business valuation is more than a price tag at exit. It’s a running assessment of your company’s health, credibility, and resilience.

Maartje van Krieken shows how valuation can serve as a practical management tool for everyday decision-making. Drawing on lessons from mergers and acquisitions, she explains why external perceptions matter just as much as internal metrics and how they shape financing terms, customer trust, and even employee morale.

Using ten lenses, Maartje unpacks the questions outsiders bring to the table: Are people loyal to the business or just its leaders? Is culture sustainable beyond a founder’s presence? Do the numbers hold up under scrutiny? Would evidence convince a skeptic? This is operational due diligence turned inward, helping leaders stress-test their assumptions and identify the gaps that weaken long-term value.

Framed as risk-based prioritization, the process reveals not just what’s broken but where the biggest opportunities lie. A quarterly review through these lenses creates a roadmap for practical improvements that strengthen operations, safeguard against risk, and build value worth defending, whether or not a sale is ever on the horizon.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Business Valuation as a Daily Tool  

02:18 Why External Evaluations Matter  

06:03 Risk, Evidence, and Defensibility  

09:55 The 10 Lenses of Operational Due Diligence  

28:06 Risk-Based Prioritization for Strategy Reviews  

Connect with Maartje van Krieken:

The Chaos Games Consulting

The Business Emergency Room

LinkedIn

Substack

YouTube

Host Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist and decision-making expert who thrives in high-stakes business environments. Combining disaster management training, hands-on experience in global industries, and leadership skills honed as a seasoned sailor, she helps businesses navigate chaos with precision. Whether tackling transformation, scaling challenges, or leadership bottlenecks, Maartje delivers actionable insights to turn turbulence into traction. 



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About the Podcast

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The Business Emergency Room Podcast
Triage, Tools & Tactics to recover from or prevent business chaos in this VUCA business environment

About your host

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Maartje van Krieken

Maartje van Krieken is a crisis strategist, executive consultant, and your at host of The Business Emergency Room podcast, where growing businesses go when things get messy. With a career that began in frontier oil and gas and spanned war zones, boardrooms, and billion-dollar pivots, Maartje has spent over two decades helping organizations steer through chaos and come out stronger.
Now through her consulting firm, The Chaos Games, Maartje works with medium-sized businesses, especially those scaling rapidly or navigating uncertainty, to diagnose breakdowns in leadership, collaboration, and decision-making before they become business emergencies. Her signature approach blends practical triage, people-first strategy, and blunt Dutch honesty to help teams realign fast.

​The Business Emergency Room delivers high-impact insights for business leaders, board members, and investors who are tired of the symptoms, disconnection, friction, paralysis, and want the tools to fix what’s really going wrong. Maartje’s episodes cut through fluff with stories, frameworks, and metaphors that turn even the most complex chaos into something leaders can act on.
Maartje is based in New Orleans and speaks regularly on navigating organizational storms, building business resilience, and turning reactive firefighting into proactive leadership. Whether you’re scaling a business, running a team, or dealing with dysfunction, The Business Emergency Room is the place to find straight talk and smarter tools.