How to Take a Sale from Negotiations to Closing

Having a potential buyer interested in your business is both exciting and deceiving. Once you begin communication with a potential buyer, the sale is far from finished.

 The next step for the buyer is to investigate your business and attempt to uncover any potential issues and liabilities that they may have to take on when acquiring it. This process can reveal issues that may have seemed small at the time -- but now decrease the value of your business or could kill the deal altogether.

 Before you consider selling, you should work with an M&A advisor to identify any value impairing issues. Unpredictable roadblocks, like changing market conditions, political changes like tariffs and shareholder disputes can be swiftly dealt with by an experienced M&A advisor.

 While you research M&A advisors to help you with this process, ask them about their experience in discovering and resolving issues during the sale process.

They should be able to tell you from experience some of the problems that they have worked to overcome during the selling process. For example, if there are tax or legal issues, advisors can work with existing accountants or attorneys to provide expert recommendations on how to reveal it to potential buyers, mitigate unnecessary costs and sustain a strong valuation.

Problems in business, like tax and legal issues, can create uncertainty that drives down value, causes buyers to walk away and / or weakens your negotiating position. M&A advisors can provide advice, from experience, on how to manage and safeguard against these issues to ensure your sale closes.

As its their sole function of their business, M&A advisors have the time to dedicate to every aspect of the sales process and brings the experience to facilitate your transaction to a close. While you keep your business running, M&A advisors manage communication and identify possible deal-breaking issues before they erupt -- so you can stay focused doing what you do best, while your M&A advisor spends time negotiating with buyers that are willing to pay a strong value of your business.