In this article we would like to share with you 3 inside business broker tricks that we use to get businesses sold for top dollar and sold fast! We are revealing here a little of what goes on behind the scenes in a business sale, and the sorts of things we do to sell your business.
It’s a nice short lesson, hopefully self-explanatory, but don’t let its simplicity be underestimated -we have helped our clients literally make millions using these 3 techniques/tricks!
Business Broker Technique #1: Qualifying the buyers
If you have ever thought about selling up or are in the process of selling up your business have you ever wondered “How do you qualify a buyer of your business?” and of course the most important part of this is how do we find out if they really do have the money or funding to buy your business?
Well, there are actually tricks to doing this and admittedly this is something that you as an individual may not be able to ascertain yourself without help. This is an area where a good business broker has much more chance of ascertaining rather than an individual seller.
Sell Your Business Goals and Priorities:
- Are they qualified?
- Do they have the money?
- Eliminate tyre kickers and time wasters
- Are they the right people to sell your business to?
If you are trying to sell your business yourself we dont recommend you go in hard asking every single potenial buyer “how much money do you have” or “do you have the money?”. This sort of questioning in our experince takes a degree of skill to get the real truth out. A broker or third party intermediary if they know what they are doing and are confident can ask these kind of questions more directly of a buyer.
We can usually work out where the buyer stands in terms of funding. Its all about the way you carefully word the questions to find out the truth, and also because a broker is perceived as being a third party intermediary (somewhat disconnected to the seller) we often find that buyers are more likely to tell us the truth about their financial situation rather than if they were dealing direct with the vendor.
In my opinion good business brokers do this extremely well. This is an extremely important step in the business sale process because you as the vendor do not want tyre kickers to be looking over your business in close detail -you can waste a lot of time and, energy and money dealing with these tyre kickers, plus you dont want to run the risk of opening up sensitive details to a buyer who cannot proceed.
Also really important is that you dont want to sell your business to a buyer who is under funded/capitalised because the risk of them failing in the short term with your business is greatly magnified if they dont have the access to funds transition and grow your business. Keep in mind that a new buyer may have significant funding costs (eg they will need to fund debtors for the first few months before cashflow starts to get positive) and you really dont want abuyer failing in the short term of taking over your business. It just creates hassles all around.
So its well worth your while learning or understanding how to choose a business broker.
