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

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

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

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.

A couple of years ago, I sat down with the owner of a veterinary clinic outside Charlotte. She had built a solid practice over 15 years. Three locations, good revenue, loyal clients. She wanted to sell and retire. On paper, it looked like a clean deal. Then we pulled back the curtain. Preparing a business for sale means getting every part of your company, your finances, your operations, your contracts, your team, into a condition where a buyer can step in with confidence and