Getting Ready To Sell Your Business With some (more) hard work, you will be in a great position to sell your business, you will have serious buyers and the valuation that you deserve for all your hard work. If you don't, why bother?

Some entrepreneurs are "starters', they like to start a business, get it off the ground and then flog it. Others are "growers', they look for existing businesses and have the ability to grow them beyond their original value. Both will probably get to the same end point: Selling the business.

But entrepreneurs are often misled when it comes to the sale. They have put everything into the business and it is worth a huge amount to them because of it. But buyers are seldom willing to match the price, because what is being sold, and what is being bought, are not the same thing.

Sellers see the emotional and financial investments they've put in; the buyer mostly looks at one thing: Profit. Effort does not equal profit. The balance is out.

Prepare for the challenges of selling

Once you get to market you will soon realise that there are, unfortunately, fewer buyers than you'd like. Unlike listed companies, you can't sell shares easily and quickly on a public platform. Instead, you need to find an interested individual or business, many of whom just aren't buying what you're selling.

Some of them are, but that doesn't guarantee a sale. Most SMEs must put their faith in a cash deal, since banks will never finance anyone wanting to buy them. In reality, this means that you may have a genuinely interested buyer for your business, who won't be able to get finance for it from the bank. So, after a few months, you're back to square one. After a few rounds of this cycle many entrepreneurs will just sell out of desperation, forgetting what the business could actually be worth.

Selling a business can be very emotionally draining and this will be compounded by many people who will waste your time and mess you around. You spent a large portion of your life building this, but others will not see it the same way you do. Ensure that you prepare and mitigate against all of those issues, and have the stomach for the fight.

Always keep the end in mind

If you are looking at exiting your business, it is crucial to allow enough time to prepare yourself for it. Maybe you're simply tired of your business and you just want to get out, but, because the business is not in a great state at the moment, you're too fed up to care, and you simply don't have the energy to fix the issues. You're at risk of letting your business go for next to nothing. All the hard work for hardly any reward.

If you have the end in mind, and prepare for it, it can be a very different, more lucrative story. A successful transaction will mostly boil down to having a solid business with great systems in place that is making decent money and the starting point for these transactions will be financial information.

You need to have proper financial records for your business and you need to be able to show the potential buyer how much the business is making and how it is making it. It sounds so elementary, yet most entrepreneurs don't have financial information when they want to sell their businesses. If you think you may want to sell in the future, make sure you're keeping solid records now.

If your business's financials are messy, start cleaning them up at least twelve months before trying to sell your business. Remove all your personal expenses from the business and ensure that all transactions are properly recorded, and that your taxes are up to date and accurate.

Work with your accountant to prepare a sales pack with all your financial information, including details of your clients, employees, suppliers, what your strong and weak points are and how the business could grow in the future. It's at this stage that you can pick up on issues and resolve them before taking your business to the market, making it a much more attractive product.