This article has been written by Jonathan Fagan Business Brokers, part of the Ten Percent Group. We deal specifically with the sale and purchase of law firms and accountancy practices, but equally it could apply to any sort of business anywhere in the UK or even around the world. I can safely write this article knowing that I can be asked this question at any time of the year and my answer is always the same. There is no good or bad time to be selling your business. Selling a business requires a bit of luck, coincidence and good fortune as well as being a decent business to be actually selling in the first place.
The slightly longer answer is that if you have a decent business making good amounts of money with an established team and a loyal customer base, then it really does not matter when you are looking to make the sale. Buyers will be interested in your business come what may and regardless of when you put it on the market.
Do businesses for sale stagnate?
Businesses listed for sale do not stagnate in the same way that houses do. A business listed with us five years ago will have the same amount of interest generated as a business listed two weeks ago. There is of course the freshness of a new listing, which does give things a bit of a boost.
Good luck is important!
As I said at the start of this article, a lot of business sales are dependent on good luck, because to achieve a sale you need to find someone who is interested in taking over a business. Not only that but you need to find someone who is interested in taking over your specific business as well as someone who is actually going to give you the price that you are looking for for it or at least the deal structure.
To achieve this you need to be in the right place at the right time because there are not streams of potential buyers out there looking to acquire your business, but rather a possible one or two who are going to give you the right price that you are prepared to accept for your business. Finding them just requires you to be in the right place at the right time as previously stated, but if you are not on the market at all then you are not going to find them because no one will know that you exist.
Reitrement plans
A popular line of approach to retiring is to think about simply contacting all the local firms and getting a competitor to buy the business. This kind of thinking is away with the fairies unfortunately for most firms. The only sort of deal you will get out of any of your local competitors is one that involves you being taken over for little or no money and for you to simply be able to walk away. There will be no deal and often the ‘buyer’ will want you to take as much of the liability as possible and for them to simply acquire anything that could be classed as an asset. Particularly for law firms and accountancy practices you need to be selling to market in order to achieve price and in order to do this you need to be on the market.
There are a lot of interested parties out there looking at sales and purchases of businesses, but they only tend to do so if your business is advertised. Most direct approaches will be of a very poor standard.
Summary
So getting back to the original question is now a good time to sell your business then yes it almost invariably is, regardless of the time that it is listed for sale. We are always happy to assist with exit strategies and planning for the future – get in touch via the Jonathan Fagan website.
