Selling your business doesn’t need to be a stressful process. At Pacific Business Advisors we handle every aspect of your transaction. From helping you establish a competative price, throughout due diligence and escrow, we ensure you get the most value for your business.
Our Initial Meeting
Recognizing concerns you may have about publically disclosing your consideration of selling your business, our initial meeting will be highly confidential. We’ll also explain the proven security protocols we employ that maintains confidentiality throughout the sales process. It’s effectively our opportunity to get to know each other. We’ll describe how the sales process functions and you get to determine if you have the confidence that we’re the right team to represent you. During our exploratory meeting, we’ll do our best to provide an initial assessment of both potential value along with the likelihood of a successful sale.
We’ll provide you with a clear road map of each of the functions you can expect us to perform, along with what your responsibilities would be. You can expect our assistance in assembling any necessary documentation; including making certain financial statements are ready and in good order. We will assist in verifying income and assets. Financial clarity is imperative in order to optimize your sale price. Importantly, in order to maximize the value of your business, we’ll want to determine its actual net income versus merely what’s stated on the tax returns. We’ll point out that the less mystery about your businesses operations, customers or its finances the better the likely sale price. Essentially, at this meeting, we interview each other to be certain the business is a good fit for us and that we are a fit for you. Neither of us is obligated to move forward.
Understanding Your Business
Once we’ve both agreed to move forward and list your business, our focus is on understanding all we can about it. It’s important that Sellers recognize the critical importance of our learning all of the unique attributes, value components and potential of your business, in order to both attract perspective buyers and to optimize its value. Who are your customers, what, if any competitive advantages do you have, how do you source your products, what’s unique about your services? We want to be able to clearly articulate to qualified prospects the operational functions of your business, who does what?
Thereafter, we need to drill down on the businesses financials. It’s highly likely that your business is worth considerably more than what’s indicated on your tax returns… not only do we realize that, but we’re highly skilled at getting prospective buyers to recognize it.
In order to protect your confidentiality from employees, customers and competitors, our initial marketing step is our preparation of a “blind profile”, one that describes your business in generalities, but without divulging either its name or its specific location. This profile will appear on multiple business-for-sale websites along with our website. Respondents will be qualified as to their ability to fund a transaction and required to sign a detailed confidentiality agreement (NDA-non-disclosure agreement) prior to learning the name of your business or receiving any details about it.
Finding a Strategic Buyer
Prior to initiating our search for perspective buyers we need to first be prepared to provide respondents to our marketing plan with a detailed memorandum (CIM- Confidential Information Memorandum) that explains your business in detail…its history, operations and positive selling points. Depending on the size and complexity of your business it can run from a few pages to many pages. In spite of the effectiveness of the Businesses-for-Sale websites at attracting prospects we go a step further and proactively market your business directly to strategic buyers. We build a comprehensive marketing plan to a target audience, one that’s predicated on all we’ve learned about your business. We then proactively reach out to our target audience via the blind-profile. Interested parties are required to sign our non-disclosure form (NDA) and thereafter receive the detailed CIM. The detailed information provided in the CIM not only attracts parties who are both qualified and interested, but also serves to eliminate those are not a good fit. Thereby saving your time so you’re not meeting with folks who had misunderstood the nature and scope of your business.
Final Steps
In order to perform our stated role as Deal Makers, not merely match makers our goal is always to effectively negotiate a closed transaction. As important as it is to get both Buyer and Seller to agree on a sale price, that step is often only the beginning of a successfully closed sale. Additional factors include, terms and conditions of the sale, the escrow elements along with the vitally important often detailed due diligence process, each of which are critically important elements that must be successfully navigated in order to finally close the transaction. Pacific Business Advisors remains integrally involved in each and every step of the business sale process…from our first meeting…through a closed transaction…we stand with you throughout the entire process to achieve your goal.