Every seller add-back fight looks like a math dispute. It's usually a mapping problem instead. When a seller adds back 100% of their own comp, they're implicitly claiming the business runs the same without them. It never does. The work doesn't disappear, it just goes unassigned until someone notices three months after close. The fix isn't arguing about one number. It's breaking the owner's role into its actual functions before you argue about any of them. Most owner-operators are quietly doing four or five jobs under one title: Sales and business development. Who's calling the top accounts when the owner isn't? Pricing and quoting logic. Is it written down, or does it live in someone's head? Customer relationships. Which accounts stay because of the product, and which stay because of a personal relationship with the owner? Finance and vendor management. Who signs off on terms, catches the anomalies, keeps the vendors happy? General management and hiring. Who's actually running the floor day to day? Price each of those separately at what it costs to replace in your market. A fractional hire, a raise for an existing employee, your own time if you're stepping into the seat. Add them up. That's your replacement cost schedule, and it's a very different number than "the owner's W-2 salary." Two things happen when you do this in front of the seller instead of just in your model. First, the conversation stops being about whether their salary was fair and starts being about who does the work on Monday - which is much harder for a seller to wave off than a number they can call "aggressive." Second, you usually find the real gap is smaller than the full add-back and bigger than zero, which is a much easier place to negotiate from than either extreme. The functional map also tells you something the P&L can't: which of those five jobs is the actual reason this business is sellable at all. If it's the customer relationships, that's a transition-planning problem, not a compensation problem, and it needs a different kind of attention before close, not after.