Various factors in your company will help you determine whether or not it’s appropriate to consider listing the business for sale immediately and foregoing some of the additional benefits that you might get for waiting, or if you should take a 6-12 month planning period to structure everything in your business the right way.
Certainly, if you plan ahead, you can almost always get a higher price for your business. However, this is only one aspect of consideration when thinking about whether or not it’s the right option for your situation.
You can do some key calculations to determine if whether or not waiting 12 more months to prepare the business for sale makes sense given your individual circumstances. If things have been down lately and you haven’t been investing your time or expenses in the right way, a 12 month preparation window can give you a chance to get things back on track and to enhance the overall profitability of your company.
This makes it that much more appealing for a prospective buyer. By eliminating unnecessary costs and reinvesting your focus on marketing, you could increase your profitability significantly, which could mean looking at a much higher multiple in the sale of your business. This is an exercise that you should undertake to figure out where things have been to get you to this point and how working with a business broker and internally in the company could help you get a better outcome in the end.
If your business is already profitable now and your previous 12 months of earnings, however, indicate that you could be successful listing your company for sale, you might choose to forego the prospect of planning many months in advance and instead direct your goals towards properly marketing the company as it’s being listed for sale. For some people there are varying reasons why you might want to leave the business sooner rather than later.
All of these considerations can also be discussed directly with a knowledgeable business broker. Website Closers has extensive experience in helping companies decide whether or not now is the right time to sell.
Scheduling a consultation with a website broker can give you a great deal of clarity over many of the most common issues that entrepreneurs are evaluating and considering in developing their next steps. While there are certainly costs to be associated with a fire sale and it can even question some buyers as to why you made the decision to sell so quickly, so long as you have the financial documentation in order and earnings reports indicating your success, you may be able to exit your business faster than you imagined. Hiring the right website broker can definitely be a key component of this decision since a website broker will likely already have a great perspective on how to get the most for your company in the shortest period of time.