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- Common Challenges to Selling a Business: Business Owner Insights (1/25/24)
- Considering Selling Your Business in 2024? (12/13/23)
- 12 Ideas to Attract and Keep Employees (11/13/23)
- Hope is Not a Strategy…and Private Equity Isn’t Your Escape Route (10/11/23)
- How to Successfully Sell Your Business to an Employee (9/25/23)
Grace Under Pressure
The process of buying or selling a business is stressful. So much goes into a successful transaction that it's easy to feel overwhelmed and most people can't make rational decisions when they're overwhelmed. As transaction brokers, we have to remain neutral. What's overwhelming about it?
From the seller's perspective:
* Deciding to list: The decision to sell your business is a big one. You've worked for years to build a strong, healthy business and selling it will bring about a big change in your life.
* Picking the price point: How much is the business worth? How much money do you need in order to pay off any debt? How much is enough for your retirement or to get you to your next adventure?
* Meeting with potential buyers: You've got people interested in buying your business. That's great! Now you've got to meet with them. This is like going on multiple first dates with multiple people. Remember how much fun that was?
* Diligence: Your buyer will now ask personal questions about your business. They will want to see your financials and they will keep firing more and more questions. This can be a dizzying time of questions and answers and will last longer than you expect.
What's crazy is that you have to survive all this while still running your business! And we haven't even talked about the days leading up to closing.
Now the buyer's point of view:
* Deciding to buy: Buying a business (whether for the first or tenth time) is a risk. How do you know what kind of business you want? Where do you want it to be located? How much do you want to invest?
* Diligence: Now you get to ask a lot of questions of the seller to make sure you better understand the business. What questions should you ask? How will you know if the seller is hiding something? When should you involve your lawyers, accountants, etc.?
* Congratulations! You've just written a huge check and now own a business that, let's face it, you don't know everything about. Now is when your adventure begins.
What's crazy is that you have to keep working at your current job or on your other businesses!
Imagine trying to do all this without an experienced business broker to guide you and help you navigate to a successful close. DIY (do it yourself) might work on a Pinterest project, but it could be a disaster when trying to buy or sell a business.
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