Tips on Selling Business:
To be a successful business
broker, you should know the followings:
1. Send out flyers to businesses
in your neighbourhood. You may drop the flyers yourself; take that
as a chance to talk to the owner. You may also use flyer delivery
service (such as through the local newspaper delivery or postal office)
to save time. The purpose is to get attention, so that they know
you are a business broker.
2. Ignore the marketability of
your listings. You have to have a good
inventory to be a successful business broker; it doesn't matter if they are all
sellable or not, but you need a bunch of businesses to sell. To draw an analogy,
it is like selling shoes. Just imagine you enter a shoes store and
look for a pair of dress shoes. The store manager, however, tells
you that they have only high-heeled shoes, white in colour and only size
9. What will you feel? Definitely you will not walk into
that shoes store again. By the same token, buyers may not approach
you if you do not have a good inventory that provides them a variety of
choices.
3. When the buyers approach you
for a particular business that you don't have on your listings, write
down all their requirements and these are your 'wanted' lists. It
does not matter if they have already had a buyer's broker or not.
The purpose is to know what people are looking for in the market, not to
get those buyers as your clients.
4. Let business owners know
that there are buyers out there looking for similar kind of business.
If they are interested to sell, you probably will get a listing.
5. It is okay to get 'open
listings'. An open listing is in fact not a listing. The
owner just wants you to get them a buyer without any commitment (no
listing signed). The way they do is they will give you an
exclusive listing for one day when you are able to find a buyer and
submit an offer to them. Open listing is common in selling
businesses as well as in selling commercial properties. It is a
good way for agent to get buyer and exposure.
6. When customers approach you to
buy a business, they may have already a target in mind: retail,
restaurant, salon, franchise or non-franchise. They may change
their mind during the selection process. It is therefore important
to have a wide selection of businesses - food, non-food, franchise,
non-franchise, low price, high price, service, retail and etc. You
may want to cooperate with your fellow brokers in the same neighbourhood
to provide a wider selection to your buyer.
7. For small business, it is
better (if your law allows) to charge a flat fee than a percentage of
the sale price. You may not able to imagine how a business asking
for $150,000 eventually sold for only $15,000.
We
will keep on updating this page, please come back later. Please go
to Business
page for more contents.
