
No Two Buyers Are Ever the Same
No two buyers are ever the same, even when they’re the exact same type. I say that to every seller who walks in already sure they know who they don’t want buying their business. It’s tempting to sort buyers into boxes before you’ve even met one. Maybe you’ve decided you don’t want a private equity group poking through your books. Maybe you...Read More
Your Business Is Your Favorite Coffee Cup
You’ve probably heard the coffee cup experiment. Give someone a coffee cup, and ask them what they’d sell it for. Then ask someone else, who’s never held that cup, what they’d pay for it. The numbers never match. The person holding the cup always wants more, because it’s not just a cup to them anymore, it’s theirs. Your business is your...Read More
Know Your Number Before You Need It
Know the number now, and you get to choose. Wait, and the number gets chosen for you. UBS asked owners who intended to eventually sell whether they had ever had a professional put a real number on the business. 58 percent said no. 48 percent had never written down an exit strategy of any kind. That is not a knock on those owners. That is decades of hard work walking into the biggest...Read More
Stop Splitting the Difference and Start Talking
Here’s what I’ve watched actually save a negotiation, more than any number ever has: one side asking the other a real question and sitting still long enough to hear the answer. Not “can we split the difference.” Something more like, “help me understand why that number matters to you,” or “what are you actually worried about here.” Buyers...Read More
The Buyer Won’t Pay for What Used to Be True
The business was good to you. It was good to your family. That part is real, and no one can take it from you. But here’s the hard line an owner has to hear before it’s too late to matter: “was good” benefited you. It doesn’t benefit the buyer. When a business isn’t as strong today as it was three years ago, the buyer isn’t interested in paying...Read More
The Offer Is Where the Hard Part Starts
Getting an offer feels like the finish line. It isn’t. It’s the starting gun. The stretch between an accepted offer and a closing table is the part of a sale nobody warns you about and it’s fraught. Danger, raw emotion, thin trust, and real fear all show up in that gap, sometimes all in the same afternoon. You’ve said yes to a stranger about the thing you spent...Read More
The Lease Can Make or Break the Deal
When you buy a business that lives or dies by its location — a restaurant, a retail store, a salon — you’re not just buying the business. You’re buying the lease underneath it. And there are more moving parts in that lease than most buyers ever stop to count. Is it close to expiring? What’s the working relationship with the landlord actually like? Do the...Read More
Ownership Lets You Control Your Destiny. It Also Removes the Safety Net.
Business ownership is for people who want to control their own destiny — their time, their income, their choices. That’s the real draw, and it’s a good one. But it has to be balanced against the other half of the truth. A regular job pays you every week. It lets you make a mistake on Tuesday and still collect your check on Friday. Ownership doesn’t work that...Read More
A $5 Million Offer Isn’t Always Worth $5 Million
A $5 Million Offer Isn’t Always Worth $5 Million As your broker, the first thing I need to know isn’t your asking price. It’s what you need at the end of the day — the number you actually walk away with once everything settles. Because here’s what I’ve learned watching offers cross my desk: price is almost never the thing we base the...Read More





