
7 Questions To Answer Before Selling Your Business
The first step towards successfully selling a business is finding a qualified business broker to work with. Sellers should also ask themselves an array of important questions. A recent article, “7 Questions to Answer Before Selling Your Business,” published by Good Men Project, has a great overview of questions sellers should answer before moving forward.
Author Troy Lambert believes that at the top of the list is one very simple and powerful question, “Are you ready?” For example, your financial reports should be ready to show.
The second question is, “What’s it worth?” Determining what a business is worth means you’ll need a professional business valuation. A great deal can go into evaluating your business and you need an expert to help you determine that value.
Third, Lambert believes that prospective sellers should ask themselves, “How’s the health of my industry?” He emphasizes that honesty is key here for a variety of reasons. If your industry is in a transition period, for example, then it might be better to wait until a better time to sell.
The fourth question on Lambert’s list is, “How long will it take?” In short, you need to remember that selling a business can take a long time. Successfully selling your business may even mean that you have to stay on and work with the new owner during a transition period.
The fifth key question is, “Who is my buyer?” You don’t want to waste a lot of time with potential buyers who are simply not a good fit. Finding the right buyer for your business helps to ensure that a deal will be finalized.
Sixth, Lambert wants sellers to think about how they will get paid. Are you willing to finance part of the deal? What about balloon payments over time? Understanding, before you put your business on the market how you want to be paid and how flexible you can be in terms of payment is essential.
For most sellers, selling a business will stand as the largest financial decision of their lives. With this realization comes more than a little pressure.
Considering the enormity of the decision, having good advice is simply a must. A seasoned and experienced business broker understands what it takes to buy and sell a business. Working with a business broker is an easy and efficient way to begin the process of selling your business. Brokers know what it takes to successfully sell a business and can help you answer these questions and many more.
Copyright: Business Brokerage Press, Inc.
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3 Things to Consider Before Selling Your Business
Some very key points from a recent article from Axial.
For business owners, summer often brings extra challenges like slower sales cycles and the musical chairs of employee vacations. However, summer is also a good time to unplug and take stock of where you are in your life and your business. If that process leads you to think about a sale of your business, you’re going to want to get ahead of the game in three key areas:
#1: Deal with the things that scare buyers away
There are a few big red flags that scare buyers away, especially financial buyers who play an increasing role in one’s exit options today. You will want to review your business, acknowledge where you have weaknesses, create a plan to improve what you can, and be ready to explain what you cannot.
Some common red flags include:
- Revenue concentration: try to avoid a situation where more than 20% of your revenue is tied up in the hands of one or two customers.
- Customer churn: High growth is attractive, but not if it comes with a really high churn rate. If your customer lifecycles are short, you’ll want to examine how you are generating leads, how you are converting leads, and ultimately how well you are delivering on your product or service promises.
- Legal risk: Are your intellectual property rights clean? Do you have any outstanding lawsuits that can be closed off? While legal risk doesn’t always scuttle a deal, you might end up needing to accept worse escrow and indemnity terms than you’ll want. If you can’t clean these items up before you start a process, you’ll want to disclose them early on.
- Key person risk: A lot of lower-middle-market businesses run pretty lean, but you’ll want to avoid too much dependence on any one person, especially the CEO. Now might be a good time to prioritize where you should bring in the right lieutenants and start those recruiting cycles
- In addition to those four, you’ll also want to deal with excessive debt (leverage) in the business, employee churn, and high degrees of sales cyclicality.

If You’re Selling Your Business, Expect The Unexpected
Many experts agree that the best time to prepare to sell your business is when you start your business. That may sound extreme. However, few business owners reach that level of preparedness. A simple fact of life and owning a business is that most sales are event-driven. Factors such as problems with a partnership, health issues, burnout or even divorce can drive a business owner to sell.
Once you’ve made the decision to sell, it is essential that you realize one key fact. Unexpected events and factors will always rise to the surface. In this article, we’ll explore four key questions that you’ll need to address before selling your business.
1. What is the Value of Your Time?
Meeting with prospective buyers can be a serious time sponge. One of the key benefits of working with a business broker is that a broker can take some of the pressure off of you. They can interact with buyers on your behalf.
A large percentage of business owners are also deeply involved in the day-to-day operation of the business. Business owners don’t have time to meet with every interested party or take the time to weed out the qualified prospects from the window shoppers.
2. What Do You Want Your Level of Involvement to Be?
Working with prospective buyers is obviously time consuming, but so is knowing every detail about a prospective buyer’s visit. A seasoned business broker can sift through what information is essential and what information is extraneous. In this way, you only hear about what is relevant and can skip the rest.
It is important for business owners to keep in mind that buyers expect that the business will continue to run successfully not just during the sales process but through closing as well. For this reason, you’ll want to stay as focused on the day-to-day operations of your business as possible; after all, if a deal falls through the last thing you want is to have a dip in revenue.
3. Are There Other Decision Makers?
Determining whether or not there are any other decision makers is a very smart move. Part-owners and silent partners will have to be addressed when it comes time to sell.
4. Just How Important is Confidentiality to You?
Confidentiality is important when it comes to selling your business. The more active your selling process, the greater the chances are that you’ll have a leak if you’re not extremely careful. Leaks unfortunately occur more than you might think.
How much will this issue negatively impact your business if it does occur? You should have a “leak plan” ready to go. In your plan, you should have in place what steps you should take to minimize the damage caused by the leak. Being ready to deal with key customers, employees and distributors is the cornerstone of dealing with any leak. Business brokers are experts at helping clients maintain confidentiality. This can save you a great deal of time and effort on many fronts.
By answering these four questions fully, you will save yourself time, stress and effort. Selling a business is a complex process. But with the right planning you can minimize your effort and maximize your results.
Copyright: Business Brokerage Press, Inc.
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