-michele hammann

Michele Hammann has spent over two decades on the question of what a business is really worth. She built the early part of it at one of the largest CPA firms in the world, serving public companies and watching how they handle reporting, governance, and the forward-looking discipline that makes investors confident enough to buy in.
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Today she is Chief Strategy Officer at an employee-owned CPA and advisory firm, SSC CPAs + Advisors, where she sits across the table from owners and translates that same discipline she learned inside public companies into terms a private business can use.
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For years she watched a repeated pattern play out. Owners would come to her when they were finally ready to sell, asking sharp questions about what the business was worth and how to make it worth more. The questions were right. The timing was years too late.
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By the time someone reaches the exit, most of the levers that build value have already been set. Public companies never have that problem, because investors force those questions every quarter, long before anyone is selling anything. Private owners almost never get asked them at all.
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So she started asking them herself, earlier, and testing the answers as she went, proving every framework inside her own firm before it went anywhere near a page.
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She had circled the book for years and even had an outline built from blog posts and notes she'd written. What tipped her from thinking about it to doing it was watching one of her own clients publish with Author.Inc and showing her exactly how it worked. When she went through the process at Author.Inc, the team took her outline and helped her structure it into the framework she uses with her clients.
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The result is Go Public in Private: A Strategic Blueprint to Go From Owner to Investor.
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The launch was quiet by design, a happy hour for the clients and friends who had been on the pre-order list. Among the people who came was the chancellor of the university she works with, who picked up the book and told her it would be his summer reading as he worked on thinking like an investor in his own institution.
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The reaction that meant the most came from a client's wife, a CPA herself. She told Michele after reading her book she finally understood exactly what Michele does for her husband's company, and had already passed the book to a friend in the same situation.
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Then, a longtime client began working through it like a checklist. And it has started to travel on its own: a contact who had been weighing a book of his own was struck by Go Public in Private and became an outright advocate, talking it up from the stage at a conference.
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She is now turning her valuation method into an app, built out of the manual spreadsheet process she has run clients through for years. The plan is to pair the book with the tool, so that when she opens outreach to new owners and to the financial advisors she works alongside, she can hand them both the thinking and the instrument to act on it.
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Becoming an author changed how she sees herself. If she could write and publish a book, she figures, she can build the software too, and whatever comes after that.
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On working with Author.Inc, Michele says, "What a wonderful experience I had. [The Book Director] made me feel immediately comfortable and got a lot more out of me than what I had in my outline."

This case study reflects one author’s personal experience. Success varies widely and depends on many factors such as genre, audience size, marketing effort, and timing.