If you own a business in Massachusetts and you are thinking about selling it in the next five years, there are two numbers you need to internalize before anything else. The first is 9 percent: the combined Massachusetts state rate on the portion of your gain above the surtax threshold (5 percent base plus the 4 percent Fair Share Amendment surtax). The second is $2 million: the Massachusetts estate tax exemption, which is not indexed for inflation, is not portable between spo

Virginia received $68.5 billion in Department of Defense contract spending in fiscal year 2023. Only Texas received more. That money is concentrated overwhelmingly in one corner of one state: Northern Virginia, where Fairfax County alone has been associated with roughly $490 billion in cumulative federal defense contracts over recent years per GovernmentContractsWon.com. If you own a Virginia business, the buyer pool you are selling into looks fundamentally different from the

Most owners selling a business in Washington DC walk in thinking the process looks the same here as it does in Virginia or Maryland. It does not. A business broker in DC is the advisor who helps you price your company, find serious buyers, negotiate the deal, and close, but in DC the tax structure rewrites the math on every one of those steps. A top-bracket DC seller can pay close to 35 percent of their long-term capital gain to federal and District taxes combined. That is on

Most people hear “Delaware” and think corporate. Fortune 500s. Holding companies. The Court of Chancery. The state pulls in close to 290,000 new business filings a year, and more than two thirds of the Fortune 500 calls Delaware home on paper. Here is what nobody tells you. That has almost nothing to do with the actual market for buying and selling operating businesses inside Delaware’s borders. The real Delaware market is small. Tight. And honestly, if you know how to play i

A business owner gets quoted $12,000 for a valuation, calls another firm and gets quoted $1,800 for what sounds like the exact same thing, and walks away convinced somebody is trying to rob him. That reaction is the most common one I see, and it is almost always based on a misunderstanding. A business valuation in the United States costs anywhere from nothing to more than $50,000, but most small business owners preparing to sell will pay somewhere between $0 and $8,000. The e

Most deals that fall apart do not fall apart over price. They fall apart over the books. Preparing a business for sale means getting your financial records clean enough to survive a buyer's accountant, a lender's underwriter, and formal due diligence, which comes down to reconciling three years of tax returns, internal statements, and bank records so they tell one consistent story. That is the whole game. Get it right and offers come faster. Get it wrong and you watch a serio

I think 10% is fair. I know that is not what a lot of sellers want to hear when they are about to part with a significant chunk of their sale proceeds, but after doing this for as long as I have, I can tell you that a good broker earns every dollar of that commission and then some. The problem is not the percentage. The problem is that too many sellers sign listing agreements without understanding what the fee covers, how it is structured, and what they should be negotiating

New Jersey is a state of contradictions for business sellers. You have some of the highest taxes on the East Coast, including a top income tax rate of 10.75% and capital gains taxed at that same rate with no preferential treatment. But you also have 15 to 21 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the state, one of the densest pools of strategic buyers in the country, a pharmaceutical corridor that generates premium acquisition targets, and the largest port on the East Coast f

A business broker is a licensed professional who manages the entire process of selling a business, from initial valuation through closing. The broker values the business, prepares the marketing materials, identifies and screens buyers, manages confidentiality, handles negotiations, coordinates due diligence, and keeps the transaction moving toward a successful close. They are part advisor, part project manager, and part deal closer. That is the short answer.

Most owners I meet have spent twenty or thirty years building something real and about twenty minutes thinking about how they get out of it. That is backwards. Your exit strategy business plan is the roadmap for how you leave the company and turn what you built into cash, income, or a legacy, and for almost every privately held business it comes down to five routes: selling to an outside buyer, selling to your managers, selling to your employees through an ESOP, handing it to

Most business brokers will tell you that selling without one is a bad idea. They have an obvious incentive to say so. And most of the time, they are right. But not always. I run a brokerage, and I am going to tell you something most of the people in my industry will not. There are real situations where selling your business without a broker is the right call. I lose deals because of this advice. I keep giving it because the alternative is letting an owner who clearly does not

Here is the number nobody wants to put on a website: out of every ten businesses that get listed for sale, somewhere between two and three actually close. The rest sit, go stale, and eventually come off the market unsold. I have watched it happen more times than I can count, and almost every time, the wrong broker was part of the problem. So let me answer the question straight. To find a business broker, you build a list of three to five candidates from professional directori

Reducing owner dependence means building a company that runs without you, so a buyer is paying for an operation instead of a job. You get there by documenting your systems, handing real authority to a management layer, and stepping out of the daily decisions well before you put the business on the market.

Here is something that catches most owners off guard. Roughly 70 to 80 percent of small businesses that get listed for sale never actually sell. They sit on the market, the price gets cut, the owner gets tired, and eventually the listing just disappears. The single biggest reason has almost nothing to do with the economy or interest rates. It comes down to whether the business was ready and whether the owner was ready. So when people ask me the best time to sell a business, h

Most owners think selling a business is one big event. It is not. It is a chain of roughly 50 to 75 smaller decisions, spread across eight phases, and any one of them can blow up the whole deal if you handle it wrong. Here is the part nobody tells you up front: only about 20 to 30 percent of businesses that go to market actually sell, according to figures from the Exit Planning Institute that get repeated across the industry. The other 70 to 80 percent never close. Not becau

Selling a service business is usually harder, and brings a lower multiple, than selling a product or manufacturing business, because a service company's value lives in people, relationships, and the owner, while a product business comes with equipment, inventory, and other assets a buyer can actually take home.

The tax implications of selling a business can swing your net proceeds by 10 to 30 percent depending on how the deal is structured, your entity type, and the state you live in, which means a $2 million sale can put anywhere from roughly $1.4 million to $1.8 million in your pocket after federal and state tax. Same price. Hugely different outcome.

Why use a business broker? A straight comparison of broker fees vs. selling DIY, the hidden costs, and what the data shows about who actually nets more.

Here is a pattern I see across New York City sellers more than I would like. The owner runs a profitable restaurant, retail shop, dental practice, or service business. They hire a broker, list it, and only then learn that the most valuable thing they own is not the business at all. It is the lease. A long lease at below-market rent in a desirable Manhattan or Brooklyn block can be worth more than the cash flow it produces. A short lease without renewal options, in the wrong n

North Carolina was ranked the number one state for business in the United States in 2025, and the state's economy grew 3.8% from Q3 2023 to Q3 2024, making it the eighth-fastest growing economy in the country.