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

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

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

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.

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.

A Pennsylvania business broker is an intermediary who values, markets, and negotiates the sale of a privately held Pennsylvania business, typically charging a success fee of 8 to 12 percent for sales under $5 million or a sliding Double Lehman scale on larger deals.

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

The most expensive mistake I see business owners make before a sale has nothing to do with timing, pricing, or picking the wrong buyer. It is using the wrong earnings metric.

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