The first buyers who look at your business are very often the best prospects you will ever get. They’re the ones who were already searching the MidSouth for a business like yours, already funded, and ready to move the day your listing went live. If we lose them with too high a starting price, they don’t come back.
That’s the whole problem with “let’s start high and come down later.” The asking price is the first thing a buyer reads, and it decides whether they read anything else. If the number doesn’t line up with what the business earns, a serious buyer doesn’t call to negotiate. They move on to the next listing, and by the time your price comes down, they’ve bought something else.
How a buyer reads your asking price
A buyer holds the asking price up against the earnings before they look at anything else. Profit, revenue trend, customer base, systems, growth, risk: that’s the checklist, and two companies in one industry can land on very different numbers when you run it. The price tells a buyer whether you know that. A price the earnings support says the owner is realistic and this deal can get done. A price the earnings can’t support says this is going to be a long, expensive road, and it says it before we’ve had a single conversation.
Negotiating room is real, and it isn’t only the price
There is value in some negotiating room. I’m not asking you to price at the floor. But as we move through the process, you’ll come to understand there are many things we negotiate on: the terms, the seller financing, the transition period, the working capital that stays in the business, the timeline to close. Price is one lever among several. We don’t need to be stuck at an inflated price the market doesn’t prove out so we have something to give back later. That’s the wrong kind of room. It costs you the buyers who would have paid the right number.
What actually happens to an overpriced listing
Nothing happens. It sits and stalls. The buyers who looked in the first few weeks are gone, the new ones see a listing that has been around a while and wonder what’s wrong with it, and then you, the seller, get aggravated with me. I understand it. But let’s be honest about what changed in that time: nothing about the business, only the price, and we could have set that number right on day one.
Price it right, or raise the value
Here’s what I’d rather see. Either we market the business at the recommended price, the one the earnings and the market prove out, and we go find those first buyers while they’re still looking. Or, if that number isn’t the number you want, we do the work required to raise the value to what you want. That is a real choice, and it’s yours. Cleaner books, less dependence on you, a documented team: it takes time, and it moves the number. Preparation to Payday™ exists for exactly that second path.
What I don’t want for you is the third option, the one that looks like a strategy and isn’t: list it high, wait, and hope.
If you’d like to know what the recommended price would be for your business today, message me and let’s talk it through. It’s a confidential conversation about what a business valuation provides, what it takes to prepare one, and what would move your number. You can book a call here: https://link.coastalconsult.org/widget/booking/Yvq26iFNxKZQfbWydX7g
