A Business Transfer - A planned or impulse decision?

24/02/2009 by info.

Everyone who starts a business or buys a business should have in the back of their mind their exit strategy.

Unfortunately, most business owners don’t have an exit strategy, an exit strategy if you think about it is a goal, and if you talk to business coaches you will find that a large proportion of business owners run their business without any goals whatsoever.

There is a category of business owners who tend to respond to some event in their lives in their decision to place a business on the market. Such as a new business opportunity or job offer, feeling a lacking motivation that day, cash flow problems, so that when a leaflet dropped through their door asking whether they wanted to sell they called the agent an obtain a valuation.

In other words they acted on impulse.

However, many of these sellers found that buyers don’t buy on impulse, and didn’t get the quick sale they wanted, so the event that lead to them instructing their agent passed. So they simply withdrew their instruction to sell.

From January 2009, this category of seller has disappeared where businesses are linked to property, as when such a business is offered for sale, an Energy Performance Certificate is required.

So now what happens is that I get initial enquiries from potential clients about selling their business, I mention that they may have to invest £500 or so upfront and they decide that they will not sell their business after all.

At least the business transfer agent will now know that the new client is serious about selling, rather than having business owners who are not really serious about selling putting their business on the market just to see what might happen.

So the agent will not be wasting time and money trying to sell a business for the impulse seller and will be able to concentrate on selling businesses for the seller who planned to sell.

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