Selling a business

How to Sell a Business on a Budget

Selling a business has the potential to be a costly process. When it comes to getting your business ready for sale, marketing it and tying up loose ends can take resources that you don’t have. 

You may be selling your business because you are in a position that makes finding any extra capital impossible or very difficult. If this is the case, why not read through these suggestions that will help you to keep the costs as low as possible during the sale.

Be prepared

The best way to keep your sale as straight forward and financially viable as possible, is to be prepared. The earlier you begin preparing, the better. If you can get all your records and business history in order for the years preceding the sale, there will be far less chance that you will encounter any costly surprises at the last minute. 

The longer you give yourself to prepare for the sale, the better you can structure your business in a way that will be favourable to a potential buyer. This will also mean that you will be able to get a far higher than price than had you decided to sell on a whim. 

Selling a business
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Find the right broker

When you are looking for brokers, you might meet with one and not see any problems and so decide to go with them so you can get the ball rolling with your sale.

Going with the first broker you find, however, will be a sure-fire way to waste some of your budget. You should find someone that has good reviews and will be able to sell your business in a timely fashion. The longer it takes a broker to sell your business, the more expensive the process can get.

If you find the right broker- one that you can trust and that has the right experience- you could end up saving money. Take your time and interview a rage of possible brokers so you can find the one that will be able to get you the buyer you want in the time you want at the price you want.

Just as with the first point, taking your time in the beginning will mean saving money in the long run.

Market your business online

Even if you have decided to use a broker, that doesn’t mean you can forget about the sale and wait for the enquiries to roll in. You should continue to promote the sale regardless of the fact you have a broker working on the sale for you.

One of the most cost-effective ways to do this is to advertise your business for sale online. Putting an ad on an online marketplace will help you to reach a huge audience. If it is a well-known website, there will be thousands of potential buyers ready and waiting to see what you have to sell. 

You need to make sure that you put all the relevant information into the ad and take good quality images to go with it if you want to stand out from the other business for sale there, though. 

Putting your business online should also allow you to keep the sale confidential so that your employees and customers don’t get wind of it.

Envision the business’s future

While this may be the end of the road for you and the business, any buyer that is going to be interested in your business will be thinking of the future. If you want to spend less time negotiating with a buyer, make sure you are able to demonstrate the potential that the business has. 

Identify areas where the right buyer could expand on what you have created. You will need to be able to point out areas of growth and directions that the business can go with the right injection of energy. 

If you can make your business look as attractive as possible to potential buyers, you will be able to sell your business in a timelier fashion which will hopefully save you money.

By Bruce Hakutizwi, Director of North America for BusinessesForSale.com, the world’s largest online marketplace for buying and selling small and medium size businesses.

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