I’ve seen the look on the face of the business owner who realizes that their business will never sell. That sale was their retirement plan. That sale would justify the years away from the family. That sale is never going to happen.
Why? There are many answers to that question. This article tackles a few.
Many business owners have a dream of selling their business some day. But many of those businesses will never be sold. You can see this simply by reviewing the number of businesses listed for sale each month on the website BizBuySell.com.
If you look at the site, you’ll see it offers listings for about 30,000 businesses at any one time. But according to BizBuySell’s recent Insight Report, there have been 1,650 to 1,890 transactions closed per quarter over the last five quarters. This means that only about 4 or 5 percent of the businesses listed on the site are being sold in any one quarter.
And that means that a lot of business owners are struggling to find a buyer who’s willing to pay anything close to asking price. If you are one of these struggling owners, you might want to consider the following questions.
This article originally appeared at: https://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/why-many-small-businesses-cannot-be-sold/.
