When It’s Time to Sell Your Business: Four Steps to a Pay Out
by Robert McGarvey
About four years after founding her business for mothers Bump Club and Beyond, Lindsay Pinchuk had a moment of reckoning: she realized it was time to sell her company. Bump Club and Beyond was built to serve pregnant women with infants. Pinchuk had been in that situation when she started the company but wasn’t anymore. “My kids were 8 and 11. I was no longer in the baby life stage,” she said. So, she decided to sell.
The realization that it may be time to sell the business strikes many entrepreneurs. But here’s a chilling reality: selling a business is not easy. In fact, many find it impossible. By some counts, 90% of startups close, and a key reason for that is no buyer could be found.
How did Pinchuk succeed when many others failed? Because she understood that “getting acquired does not happen overnight. It is really hard,” she said. That means you have to work at it, maybe as hard as the work involved in starting a new business.
You want to sell your business and have the same happy ending as Pinchuk, who eventually had three companies seeking to buy her out? Below are four steps that just about every business that sells will have to take and two mistakes that will likely kill all sales prospects for a company. Use this as your road map for a perilous journey.