How Do We Confidentially Sell Businesses?

Questions come up about how, tell us about the process that a business broker goes through in confidentially selling my business. So what we do is we work with you, the seller, we analyze what you want to do, I mean, what your next chapter is going to look like. We look at your financials, your profit and loss, your balance sheet, whether real estate's involved or not, any specifics that you have on your exit strategy. And then we confidentially put together a listing agreement that basically creates an executive summary, or sometimes you hear the word CIM, Confidential Information Memorandum. And based on that, we provide that to buyers, qualified buyers. So the buyer has to go through, if they respond to an inquiry, the inquiry may be, they may see a post... So different companies do it differently, but it Transworld Business Advisors, we have our own internal database of over 150,000 pre-qualified buyers. And then we also work with all the internet for sale websites. So we're on all of those. And what we do is we present it in a general term. So if you're an advertising agency and you're looking to sell, but you don't want anybody to know that you're selling, obviously your employees and your clients. We post something like, "25 year advertising agency, located in the Southeast US, showing great profitability at 2.2 million in sales with this kind of owner benefit, is looking for that next buyer." So if there are individuals in our database of 150,000 buyers that are particularly looking for an advertising agency, they'll Google advertise agency for sale, we should pop up as one of the prospects for them. They send an inquiry to us saying, "Hey, I want to know more." The process is, is we then send them a nondisclosure agreement, many times that's known as an NDA, nondisclosure agreement, as well as a buyer profile. So unless the business broker gets back a filled out nondisclosure agreement, which is a legal document saying that they are not allowed to talk about this opportunity, this investment, and the buyer profile. So it's one thing that they fill out the NDA, but most times you'd want to get a buyer profile filled out, which shows that they've got the ability to buy this business. Either the credit worthiness or the finances to buy it. Once they fill that out, then the business broker will share some confidential information with the buyer to see if it goes to the next step. Once it goes to the next step, and they want to know more at that point, we share tax returns and other specifics, but the process is very controlled. As a business broker, we function as the quarterback for you, the seller, because you still got to run your business during the day. This is what we do for a living. So let us help you. And whether it's a Transworld Business Advisor, or whether it's other brokers or intermediaries that are in the sector of providing this, there are folks out there that specialize in helping you sell your business, and we'd love to help you. And we help you all the way through to closing process. And even afterwards, we keep the relationship going. Because we want to make sure that you get a good buyer for your business.