Sell Your Business

Here’s where most Business Brokerages fail 90% of the time. The financial metrics of a business are its core vitals – they tell the story of positive and negative trends, the health of the company as a whole, and the opportunities that exist for savings and growth. Many brokers will send out a company’s listing without taking the time to truly understand the company’s financial profile, suggest changes as necessary, or ensure that the company looks as good as possible financially before pulling the trigger to go to market. While it’s a huge mistake for our competitors, for us, it makes us stand out because we are considered to have the best and cleanest deals on the market.

Our valuation process is fresh – nothing like our competitors. Our proprietary system will guide you and your advisor through a series of steps to not only determine the expected Enterprise Value of your business, but it will also provide opportunities to improve the business to increase its likely market value. And most important, there are many ways to value a business … we take all possible valuation methods into account to ensure that we’ve maximized your Enterprise Value at market, and as important, we can provide quantifiable justification as to why we are priced where we are at market. Our system has been proven through thousands of transactions worldwide, including those at our sister companies. Your expert broker will take all facets of your business and its assets into account to craft a go-to-market strategy that ensures you top dollar. Since we are a performance-based business brokerage, we are aligned at the hip with our clients … the more success we bring to you, the more successful we will be as well.

Another place where our competition fails is on the buyer. While we are sell-side representatives and focus on the best interests of our clients (business owners), we also understand just how important the buyer is to a business sale. In fact – they are 50% of the deal, so if you don’t get that right, you end up with failed deals, frustration, and low close rates. Our close rates are among the highest in the industry due to the simple, common-sense approach we use to develop buyers that work with our firm. Since we know the statistic (roughly 90% of all buyers looking for a business never buy one), we don’t mess around with tire kickers. We do this using a tried and true approach to education (through our Buyer’s Club), a multi-prong approach to vetting (which varies depending on the deal value and buyer type), a process of helping the buyer as necessary when speaking with their lenders and equity providers, and by insisting on tight milestones that must be met once we go under contract. Another important element to buy-side work is ensuring that the buyer is the right fit for our client, strategically, economically and from a personality perspective. Our job is not to just throw random buyers at our clients in the hope that something works out; instead, we focus on providing highly vetted buyers that we know can close and that have the “fit” we need them to have with our clients.

After a number of buyer calls and offers are made, our job is to help you navigate all offers to both help you choose the best buyer for your business, but also the best deal in the Letter of Intent. The LOI stage is critical and often overlooked by unsophisticated business brokerages who just hire anybody off the street in the hopes that they can close. With us, every staff members has important financial and business experience and has been trained to navigate offers and ensure the best results for our clients. While the LOI is not the final purchase agreement, all business points associated with a transaction should be agreed upon in the LOI so that all that is left when negotiating the final purchase agreement are the legal terms. Only a highly experienced broker knows where to fight, how hard to push and what to communicate in order to get you the very best deal … and just as important … a wise broker will know when a client might be asking for more than what most buyers will accept, with appropriate advising along the way. In the end, the only deals that get closed are those that are fair to both sides (or as some say, hurt both sides a little). The broker is the intermediary to help keep the deal fair for both, while always protecting the client throughout the process.

Once a deal is under contract, some brokers think they can just sit back and let the parties trade information. Not our team – we are control freaks and require all parties to meet their obligations on time, keep the ball rolling and never let the buyer overstep. All of diligence is traded in a highly secured Virtual Data Room and mandatory weekly calls keep the parties on their toes. Our job in this process includes ensuring that the buyer meets all of its LOI timeline milestones, and if they are raising capital,the process is not delaying a closing. It is also important that your broker be on top of the legal process. Some lawyers “over-lawyer” and cause problems that sometimes are unsurmountable unless they are properly managed by a highly competent deal broker. Our team will not let a lawyer kill a deal, like they are so famous for doing. This is where a broker earns its stripes … by navigating further negotiations from information found in diligence, to lending covenants mandated by lenders, to the reps and warranties and disclosure schedules provided by ownership. All of it is tedious and confusing to those that have never been there, but our team will hand-hold you through it providing highly experienced advisory counseling every step of the way.

Selling a business that you have built from scratch is both exciting and stressful. Selling or not selling – these are questions that will haunt you throughout the process, and the stress of the transaction can seem overwhelming … unless of course you have a deal partner at your side helping you through all of it and sharing the experiences of their own exits (as well as exits from other clients’ businesses). By alleviating this stress and getting paid on the closing day, you can pop champagne knowing that you’ve worked day and night to build something amazing and left nothing on the table. You should be proud of your achievement – as so few in this world can say they have done what you have … and Deal Pipe was with you every step of the way. We can’t wait to congratulate you on the sale of your business!