Commercial brokers can help you get a higher price for your business.
Would you like to know what role commercial brokers can play in helping you get a higher price for your business?
The term “business broker” is a very broad term, so I want to talk about that for a second.
We often hear from business owners that they get a call every week from someone saying they are interested in buying their business. Nothing is needed to be a business broker.
All you need to do is find a company that might be for sale and turn around and call groups like Edgewater and say, I have a company that wants to sell itself, how about you come buy it? And be careful not to take too many of those calls because you will be wasting your time.
But there are business brokers who help prepare businesses for sale. That’s someone that maybe your CPA or attorney could recommend to him so he has someone he can trust.
Sometimes these business brokers are former business owners who will help you think about addressing those issues that are lowering your value.
They help you think about the right way to value your business so you don’t have false expectations. They help you think about who might be good people to help you sell your business.
It can be a multi-year investment to get your business ready to sell, but I’ve seen it work very, very effectively. It really is a different business than running the company, and they can be good at it, so I highly recommend it.
I would also strongly recommend that you get the right kind of lawyer and the right kind of accountant.
We bought a company about five years ago that had a great management team, but the attorney advising them was the one who also handled their personal real estate. However, the world of mergers and acquisitions and business sales requires a different skill set.
He stomped on and demanded all sorts of specific things that frankly we didn’t care about and we were happy to compromise on some of them. But he missed out on some of the biggest economic points that we were all happy to take advantage of. He didn’t do a good job representing his client.
So find the right attorney. Find the right accountant. They will be good advisers and partners during this process.
And the last thing I would say is if you want to prepare to sell the business, talk to your family, talk to your closest advisers and reflect on whether or not this is the right time or three to five years from now. weather.
Be honest with yourself because when you sell that company, you get a check and someone else gets to keep the company.
Retirement can be a tough thing for people, so be prepared to sell and don’t get distracted by false starts.
You need to start a year or two or three years before you really want to get off the ground so you can set up your business for maximum value.
There is a lot involved here. There are different types of buyers. There are different motivations of those buyers, but those buyers know what they are looking for most of the time if they are quality buyers.
An experienced buyer knows what to look for. And sometimes those qualities are things that don’t come naturally to someone running a business, just like running a business doesn’t come naturally to a finance person who might be looking to buy a company.
So recognize those differences, seek help planning ahead so you can correct the shortcomings, get your house in order, clean up your finances, and be ready to move forward when the business and you personally are ready to make a decision. good impetus to sell the company. It is not as easy as it may seem.
But once you do, if you have a good business, it can put you and your family in a position of financial security for generations to come, and that’s a great reward for many years of work for an entrepreneur.
