In this video, we talk about the three simple steps you can take to bring your business to the market.
"As business brokers in Sydney we are experts at helping business owners bring their business to market successfully, whilst preserving confidentiality.
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Transcript:
The saying in real estate is location, location, location. In business sales the saying is “preparation, preparation preparation! There are 3 essential things that are needed for a business sale to be successful.
Just like real estate you need the right price, you need a buyer who has the funds to pay the right price – these 2 go without saying, and then there is something that you don’t have to worry about when selling a house – is you need the buyer to reasonably demonstrate they are capable of running the business so that the lease can be assigned. Without this – there simply is no business sale at all.
So in order to find a buyer that is going to tick all of these boxes, the preparation that you and your business broker do before you take your business to market is really important.
We want to break the steps down in a really simple way for you so that you know what to do during your preparation preparation preparation phase. You want to be addressing these 3 things with your business broker. The business profile, this is the information that buyers will receive. Your confidentiality strategy and the Marketing strategy.
Your aim is to attract the largest pool of buyers in the shortest amount of time so that they are competing over your business, whilst making sure that they have access to all the information they need to make a decision, and all the while maintaining full confidentiality.
Let’s start with the business profile, this is one of the first things that you and your broker should be doing. You should rely on your broker to guide you through the various pieces of information that you should have prepared, and this will vary for different industries.
The financials, staff, customers, suppliers, equipment and machinery, intellectual property, stock, processes, and even the method of sale are all key pieces of information to prepare and address before you take the business to the marketplace.
Once you have this information prepared, and your business broker has prepared a sales profile, you should address confidentiality. Confidentiality can be one of the biggest threats to a business, and the longer the business stays on the market the higher the chances of a breach are.
Obviously some of the information that you have prepared is going to be highly sensitive – and the catch 22 is that a buyer will need to see it if they are going to buy the business, so what steps need to be in place to protect your information whilst building buyer confidence at the same time. Speak to your business broker about the qualification process they go through and try and understand how the buyer’s first few interactions with the broker will look like.
Are you confident the business broker can establish rapport ? What information can be disclosed early on, and what information can only be disclosed after a certain point of buyer commitment?
Once you have an airtight confidentiality strategy and your business profile prepared, you are ready to market your business for sale. The better job you do at marketing your business for sale, the more enquiries you receive, means the more qualified buyers, means the more offers, means the higher sale price.
The really simple rule when putting together a great marketing strategy is this – always ask your business broker what more can you do, instead of asking as tempting as it is how much can you discount. Which approach do you think will give you the best marketing strategy, and therefore the best end result.
At VBA we are really happy to discuss with you the process in more detail, so if you have a business you are thinking of selling sometime in the future, give us a call so we can help you get all of your boxes ticked.
Remember, business profile, confidentiality, marketing is how your find that buyer that also ticks all of the boxes. Thanks very much for watching from all of us at Vision Brokers and Advisors, we really look forward to working with you.