Selling Your Business

Preparing Your Business For Sale

We have worked with very many clients looking to prepare their business for sale, either in the near future or five years and beyond.  We have distilled the advice we have given these owner managers into a process called ‘Plan4Sale’.

Phase 1 of the process is to understand the needs and wants of the client, then try to get a feel for the risks and probable factors that determine the Company’s valuation (we call this ‘self-due diligence’). To that end we have prepared a questionnaire which will help answer those questions.

Plan4Sale — Business Owner Questionnaire

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Preparing To Sell Your Business

Would you like to sell your business one day? Perhaps in the next five years? Frazer Hall has distilled years of experience of selling businesses into a free checklist called Plan4Sale Critical Tidy Up Actions (PDF) to help you prepare.

Even if your sale may be several years in the future, there are actions you can take now to ensure your business is an attractive proposition for potential buyers from a logistical and practical point of view, and to remove any potential stumbling blocks.

Areas to consider, included in the Plan4Sale, include Financial, Documentation, Premises, Management, Staff and Balance Sheet issues. You are welcome to download and use the Plan4Sale.

Do contact Frazer Hall on stephen.frazer@frazerhall.com with any questions, for no-obligation, confidential advice, or if you would like to progress your potential sale to the next stage.

Plan4Sale — Critical Tidy Up – Checklist

Selling Your Business

Our clients are smart, successful people, but often when it comes to them selling their business, they are doing it for the first time and so it can appear highly complex. Add to this, that the sale could be the biggest economic event of their life, with the mixed emotions of leaving an entity that they created with their personality all over it – and you can see why selling a business can be daunting for the owner.

With this in mind, it is worth thinking about some of the following:

Personal

• What is your financial position and what income will you receive post sale – is it enough?
• What are you planning to do personally post sale ? If you have worked 70 hours a week for the last fifteen years, then following any post sale hand over, what personal challenges do you have?
• What does your partner think about all of this?

Business Plan

• Do you have a clear plan of how the business can be developed?
• Who is likely to buy the business and what will be attractive or unattractive to them?
• Is the plan clearly communicated to all staff?

Management

• The biggest concern for buyers of owner managed businesses is the dependence upon the owners. Are you able to delegate responsibility to a good management team and are they sufficiently motivated to remain at the Company after a sale?

Timing

• When is the best time to sell your business, taking into account the perspective of the buyer – all too often, sellers may have a window in which to sell, brought about by the specific and finite need of a buyer company, a change in legislation, or the crest of a wave for trading;
• When is the best time for you personally to sell, taking into account family, pensions and other personal ambitions.

If you want to confidentially talk this through with us over a coffee, we’d love to meet up.