You dream of selling your business, but right now it’s falling down around you. Customers have dried up. Employees keep leaving. You can’t seem to get anything to work the way it used to when things were good.
It must be time to sell — someone will take it off your hands, won’t they?
Don’t assume that closing your business and selling it can both be viable choices at the same time. Buyers look for many things in a business they buy, but pending failure isn’t one of them.
So often owners don’t think of selling the business until things are going from bad to worse — and it’s almost certainly too late by that point.
Sometimes the answer is to sell it, and there’s a simple approach that will help you understand if your business is sell-able. But sometimes the answer is to close it, and this Daily Worth artcile by Megan Broussard highlights 6 signs that it might be time to close the business.
Cody McLain, the founder of SupportNinja and digital creative agency WireFuse, describes the moment of letting go beautifully: “Building something from scratch just for it to end up like a sandcastle at the shore waiting for the tide to take it away is what closing shop feels like. It’s not easy, and it hurts your pride more than anything else.”
But knowing when to throw in the towel will save you further heartbreak — and lots of money.
