What is the business selling process?
If you are thinking about selling your business, it’s not a bad idea to start planning before the day arrives. Selling a business is largely about setting practical expectations. It can be an challenging and laborious journey, but one with a very rewarding end result.
Here are some questions to ask yourself?
- Can Your Business Be Sold?
- Does it have a solid history of profitability?
- Does it have a large and loyal base of customers?
- Does your business have a competitive advantage (intellectual property rights, long-term contracts with clients, exclusive distributorships, desirable location)?
- Does your business have opportunities for growth?
- Are You Ready to Sell?
- Do you find yourself not enjoying it anymore? Burnout is a very common issue for business owners.
- Are you not inclined to invest in growth?
- Do you feel like you have hit your maximum growth potential? It is not uncommon for business owners to build their business to a certain point and then realize they lack the skill set required to go further.
- What’s Your Business Worth?
- Do you have your books in order?
- Read here for Items Necessary to Perform an Broker Opinion of Value analysis.
Here are the set that will be involved in the business selling process:
- Initial Meeting
- Discuss confidentiality with business owners
- Obtain business goals and selling objectives
- Gather information from financial statements
- Review of Financials to Determine Value
- Determine value from financial review
- Explain preliminary estimate of value
- List with Whitehurst
- Complete Exclusive Listing Agreement
- Marketing Package Preparation & Approval
- Create marketing package
- Review and approval of marketing package by seller
- Screening & Qualification of Buyers
- Filter inquires in a confidential manner
- Obtain Confidentiality Agreement
- Screen and financially qualify the buyers
- Scheduling and Conducting Seller & Buyer Meetings
- Negotiations
- Obtain executed Letter of Intent
- Submission of deal package to underwriting for approval by lender
- Coordinate Offer to Purchase
- Agree upon terms and price between seller and buyer
- Work with the closing attorney to create all the legal documents necessary to complete the transaction
- Coordinate due diligence and closing
- Closing
- Work with business owner’s CPA in areas of deal structuring and/or tax considerations
- Follow Closing Checklist
- Guide the closing process
- Follow-up
If you would like a free selling your business resource, please check out this free guide from Biz Buy Sell.