“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
(also published on 26 February 2019 by Daily Maverick as its quote of the day)
Your business is as good as you have been able to make it so far. It is a thing of pride to you. It is something worth selling one day.
But when you sit across a table from a prospective purchaser, she will tell you all about the weaknesses. She will lead with passive-aggressive questions. They will leave you wondering how such a lousy business could be so precious to you.
She has to find a way of suppressing the price of the deal. That is her first step in getting the best return for her investment.
“You make your surest profit in the purchase price.”
about a million investment advisors on Youtube
Of course, your best deal in selling your business is in maximising your selling price. As they remind us in the many court-room dramas playing out: it is an adversarial process.
So she will tell you how desperately she wants this business. For the lowest price possible. Even if it is quite a kak business. </ironyfont> That pretty much sums up the average business buyer strategy.
Your job is to refute those claims. But if you find yourself offended and angry, things will go wrong. The best way of moving forward is to identify issues and plan responses in advance.
There are some things about your business which could improve. Every business has place for improvement. They are unlikely to improve before the deal. Your purchaser is also unlikely to improve on them post deal. When she sells the same business in a few years, she will be defending the same issues.
The difference in successes will be in preparation, and in playing the cards you have.
Our CSuite subscribers learn about the weaknesses they will face in a sale. Then they learn how to preempt the objections with facts and not emotions.