Jay B. Abrams, ASA, CPA, MBA, is a nationally-known authority in valuing privately-held businesses who has invented more than 160 mathematical valuation formulas and several important valuation models and methods. He is the author of four books on business valuation, with McGraw-Hill as publisher of the first two and John Wiley & Sons as the publisher of the next two.
His first book, Quantitative Business Valuation: A Mathematical Approach for Today’s Professionals (QBV), ©2001 is the most advanced, mathematical text on the valuation of privately-held businesses. The second edition (QBV2), now his third book, printed in 2010 with Wiley & Sons. It has a 4.6-star rating on Amazon.com[1] at http://www.amazon.com/Quantitative-Business-Valuation-Mathematical-Professionals/dp/0470390166 and has been used as a textbook at the undergraduate and graduate (MBA) level in the U.S., Germany, Russia, and India.
His second book, How to Value Your Business and Increase its Potential ©2005 (HTV), is a simpler book on valuation for business owners and their professionals. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) used HTV as a textbook in a class on business valuation for CPE (Continuing Professional Education) credits.
CFO Magazine has printed two articles about uses of specific mathematical formulas Mr. Abrams invented and published in both of the books and interviewed Mr. Abrams as an industry expert for an article on business valuation for its 20th anniversary issue in March 2005.
Mr. Abrams has finished the first draft of the manuscript of his extremely mathematical fourth book, Valuing S Corporations and Pass-Through Entities and is working on the final manuscript, which he expects to publish in 2026. He has published numerous seminal articles in the American Society of Appraisers’ Valuation Journal, Business Valuation Review, and The Valuation Examiner.
Mr. Abrams is the principal of Abrams Valuation Group, Inc., a business valuation firm with offices in Valley Village, California, San Diego, California, and New York. He was a Project Manager at Arthur D. Little Valuation, Inc. in Los Angeles, California, where he performed the valuations of Columbia Pictures, Dr. Pepper, Purex, MCO Geothermal, VSA, and many other large firms.
Mr. Abrams has an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago, where he also took graduate courses in the Department of Economics. He received his B.S. in Business Administration from California State University, Northridge, where he received the Arthur Young (now Ernst & Young) Outstanding Accounting Student Award in 1972.
Mr. Abrams has spoken in a variety of different professional and public forums about valuing privately-held businesses, including filming 1, 3, and 7-hour lectures for the National Business Institute, www.attorneycredits.com, LearnFormula, Lexvid, and Celesq. He has given live lectures to the National Business Institute, the California State Bar Association, the National Association of Certified Valuation Analysts (NACVA), the American Society of Appraisers (ASA), the AICPA, Anthony Robbins’ Mastery University—Financial Mastery, and the National Center For Employee Ownership Annual Conference. He has taught business valuation as continuing legal education in many law firms and seminars at the University of California at San Diego Extension and the University of San Diego Law School for the late U.S. Tax Court Judge David Laro. He taught MBA classes in valuation at the University of Southern California for Professor Tom Taulli and at California State University of Northridge for Professor Vincentiu Covrig.
Last updated 12/2/25