Selling a Business

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

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

Most business owners who ask me this question already have a number in their head. Almost always, that number is wrong by 30 to 50 percent. That is not a knock on the people asking. It is human nature. You built the thing. You know what it cost you in time, money, and lost weekends. You assume that effort translates into market value. It does not. Here is the honest answer. If you run an owner-operated business with under $2 million in earnings, your sale price is going to la

Most sellers are genuinely caught off guard by this one. Industry data from business brokerage surveys consistently shows the average time-to-close for a small to mid-sized business runs between 6 and 12 months. Some owners hear that and think they are ahead of schedule. Most find out they were behind before they ever started. Selling a business is not like selling a house. There is no open house weekend, no sign in the yard, no offer in two weeks. It is a layered process of

A few months ago I sat across from a business owner who had built a $3 million revenue building company from scratch. Twenty-two years of early mornings and late invoices. He wanted to sell. Great. But he had already made three mistakes before he even called me, and two of them nearly cost him six figures at the closing table. I see this story repeat itself constantly. Selling a business is the process of preparing, pricing, marketing, negotiating, and closing the transfer of