There are many reasons a business owner makes the monumental decision to sell their business.  Some arrive at the decision because they simply want to retire and don't really have anyone to leave the business to.  Others because they have had financial problems for some time now and have been unable to turn the business around. Financial problems can be caused by employee problems like theft, a changing industry, grand scale competition such as a small hardware store competing with a big box store that sells product at cheaper prices then the small business can even buy for.  Another reason is the strong desire to simply reduce stress in their lives or because they are flat out tired of the daily grind.  Partners that truly need a divorce provide a strong reason to sell.  Any of these sound familiar?

Now the problem is finding someone who has the expertise that will allow them to take over all of your problems. As you can imagine this narrows the field to an extremely small field.  The only other alternative is to find a way to clean up the business prior to selling and make it worth something to a buyer.  Most of us who are in trouble wait too long to make our next move. By the time we realize we can't obtain normal financing, our creditors are cutting us off and suing.  So we make a desperate attempt to increase sales.  By the time we realize that will not work fast enough we try to cut costs, AGAIN.  This time we cut so much that our product or service runs the risk of being compromised.  We look for a joint venture or angel financing but find no help.  Now we say, "what if I could sell"  Because the business is so far gone we only find "buyers" who want to steal the business and for some reason we still believe that there is a great value in our business and just getting off the hook isn't good enough.  So we wait too long again and the buyers go back into the woodwork for whence they came. We decide that if we could just place our book of sales, we could at least generate an income from all of our past efforts.  But alas, competitors who would have once hired you in a heartbeat now smell blood in the water. They reason that there is no need to pay you a commission on sales that they will be able to scoop up for free when you go down for the third count.

What does this all mean to you?  If you decide you want to sell, the faster you come to grips to do so, the better the results will be.  Clean it up financially and appearance wise, make it as presentable as practical and don't fool yourself into believing that it is worth a king's ransom.  Try to be practical and remove your emotion and ego from the situation.  Knowing all the problems, what would you pay to buy what you know you now want to get out of?  We ourselves do buy a few very select number of businesses to turn around if they meet our criteria, but we also have many contacts with business buyers and brokers.  There are only two ways to value a small, privately held business and we can offer assistance in determining the true value.  We also offer some very quick methods to clean up the business and make it salable.