While selling businesses, many people looking to acquire it sense that there’s blood in the water or that they can get a great deal by milking you for all you’re worth. That is an approach that needs to be countered by a good businessman and which needs to be met with counters.
Objectively Determine Pricing
Overpricing your business will drive people away and under-pricing it will be a disservice you do to yourself that you may never forgive yourself for. Hence, you need to adopt the middle approach and set objective parameters by which to judge your business’ true value.
You could ask your business broker to do this for you or have a firm conduct a full valuation of your assets and give you a number that is indicative of that fact. All of this will show that you have the strength of character to value your achievements as they deserve to be. Over valuing your business will show that you have hubris and under valuing it will show that you have little confidence in what you’ve built and that will attract people that want to exploit you.
Maintain Business as Usual
You shouldn’t take away attention from your business if you’re planning to sell it. That will mean that you will be constantly reducing its value. You also need to make sure that you hire a broker that will make handling your business during the sale negotiations as hassle free as possible.
The broker will filter all of the candidates interested in the sale for you so that you don’t waste your time with non-serious people. Selling that business should be a practical decision rather than one that you’re ready to go all out on and neglect your business for. That will help no one and spread the word that you’re desperate to sell.
Understand your Buyer
You need to make sure that you play to your strengths and show the buyer what interests them instead of what you think is the best thing about your company. That needs to be chiseled in to your brain when you sell your company. It’s no longer going to be your company, so you need to identify what makes it great through an impartial lens. Perhaps conducting a third-party analysis of your company will help set that in stone.
Maintain Confidentiality
You also need to keep secrets close to the chest during negotiations. While everything is being ironed out, you don’t have to divulge company secrets or talk about classified information. Make sure that your broker has a confidentiality agreement ready to sign. A confidentiality policy will ensure that your potential buyers are under legal agreements to not speak of any classified information once they are beholden to it.