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Posts Tagged ‘Businesses For Sale’

When advertising your business for sale, it is not necessary to seek the services of a business broker.

There is no question that the skills and qualification of a professional business broker will provide are valuable in the business selling process, but by following a few simple steps you can complete the transaction of the sale privately, while saving money on agent fees and commissions.

There are 4 basic steps that need to be taken.

The first thing that needs to be calculated is the value of the business. This may seem like an easy task, but advertising your business at the wrong price will have disastrous effect. An over valuation of the business will see potential buyers come and go and as a result, the quick business sale you were after will turn out to be a lengthy, expensive exercise. On the other hand, an under valuation of your business will see a quick sale, and huge financial losses bringing your equity to a minimum and in some cases coming out of the sale owing money to the banks. Valuing a business is not only based on profit and assets. Location, condition and good will are also taken into account. Seek advice from your solicitor or accountant. Between the two, they should be able to determine exactly what your business is worth. Always allow a 10% buffer on your advertised price. This will give you room to negotiate and ultimately hit your selling price.

When it comes to the promoting and advertising of your business for sale, there are many different options. Traditional newspaper business for sale classifieds and business for sale magazines are effective, however with the huge growth and power of the internet, this will be the most effective advertising you will do. There are many businesses for sale website such as www.Business-Trader.com.au which generate a lot of traffic, giving your listing maximum exposure. If your business has a shop front, you can also utilize this space as a place to advertise your business for sale.

Once your advertising campaign has taken full effect and are now generating many leads and enquiries, you need to be able to qualify a potential buyer. Approximately 90% of your enquiries will be tyre kickers, and having the ability to eliminate these enquires will be a huge benefit. Being able to tell the difference between the serious and not serious buyers will save you time and money. Doing a credit check on the buyer or company will give you an immediate inside look of the potential customers financials. Focusing your attention on a buyer who is really not interested in buying a business, may lead to a serious buyer being neglected and walking away from the sale.

Last but not least, the closing of the sale. Having your business ready for the sale will also save you time when you have found a buyer. You want to make sure that all of your paper work, legals, outstanding loans, overdue accounts etc are all up to speed. When closing the deal, you want it to go as smoothly and quickly as possible and by being prepared you can avoid delays and achieve a quick sale.

If you are toying with the idea of selling your business you have a few decisions to make. Firstly are you going to advertise it everywhere or are you going to try and get a private sale without letting the world know that you want to exchange owners. They both have their advantages over each other and should both be considered in order to give you the best results. Firstly if you decide to let everyone know that you are looking to sell your company the word will get round much faster so that there is a much bigger chance that you will find the buyer much quicker. However, there are certain disadvantages that you may foresee if you globally let everyone know that your New South Wales business is for sale. One of these could be the fact that people would avoid using you because many people give up with their companies as they are selling them. This mainly depends on what type of business you are running, if you are doing something such as web hosting then people may look elsewhere because they cannot afford to have any downtime or lack in customer services while the transfer is taking place. More times than not this wouldn’t happen but not many people would like to take the risk as it could make them lose money.

If you feel this could potentially happen if you were to let your customers know that you plan on selling your company you could go for the private sale route. This is keeping it quite so that people won’t even know that the business has changed hands, thousands of companies are doing this every year and no one can tell the difference because it still operates in exactly the same way as it did before. The major disadvantage of this method is that it can take a lot longer to actually find a potential buyer because you cannot broadly advertise the fact that your New South Wales business is for sale in the normal places people advertise businesses for sale. Don’t get me wrong, there are still many different places that you can advertise it for sale so this method could be better for you, it jut requires more research but the you still would go about it the same way in the fact of giving the required information to potential buyers. If you can, you should get all your revenue figures beforehand because everyone would want to see proof of these before they invest any money in the company.

If you feel overwhelmed finding people and talking to them then there are methods which you can use to make it easier and more comfortable for yourself, professional advice can be found in many places. These will help you keep everything quiet and recommend the best places to advertise the fact that you are willing to sell up. Another hard task they can help you with is the asking price of your company, they will be able to look through the information and come up with an unbiased figure that is both fair to yourself and the buyer.

Make sure you consider advertising your company on the internet as well as locally, this will give you a better chance of finding genuine buyers which will no doubt speed the whole process up. It could also mean that you get more money than expected if you have people desperately trying to buy your business. Don’t be afraid of letting people know the reason for selling and don’t try to come up with false reasons as this may show and would deter many people from buying from you.