Most owners come to me already wrong about what their business is worth. Not by a little. By a factor of two, sometimes three. And when I ask where the number came from, the answer is almost always the same: somebody on the internet told them an industry multiple. Here is the problem. A business valuation multiple by industry is a number buyers and lenders use as a starting point, calculated by dividing comparable sale prices by the seller's earnings to produce an SDE or EBIT

The documents needed to sell a business fall into four buckets: financial, legal, operational, and marketing/growth. A typical lower-middle-market data room contains 50 to 200 individual files.

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