The Seven Stages of Selling Your Business
The Arc of a Sale
A sale is a measured distance. You need to know exactly where you are, what happens next, and what it costs if you get it wrong.
Is it actually time to sell?
Before you sign anything or hire anyone, you need an honest assessment of whether the business is ready to sell, and whether you are actually ready to let it go.
View Stage Details →The year before you go to market
The operational and financial cleanup that must happen before you go to market. This is where you fix the issues buyers use to drive down your valuation.
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Customer concentration: the number that decides your multiple
If your top customer accounts for 30% of revenue, you don't have a business to sell. You have a job with that customer.
The head start nobody explained to me
An attorney once told me to start a year or two before I actually started selling. I nodded, filed it away, and had no idea what he meant. He was right — and he undersold it.
What does an offer actually look like?
A purchase price is usually not one thing. It's several kinds of money, and they don't carry the same weight — two offers with the identical headline number can be wildly different deals.
The business sale glossary
The financial, legal, and transaction vocabulary you'll hear during a sale — from adjusted EBITDA and add-backs to working capital pegs and tax elections.
Selling Your Texas HVAC Business
Two HVAC companies with nearly identical revenue and profit can draw completely different valuations. What produces the difference is the kind of work you do.
Selling Your Texas Plumbing Business
Buyers sort you into a category first — residential service, commercial construction, or specialty — and everything in the sale follows from where you land.
Selling Your Texas Electrical Business
In Texas, a master electrician's license can serve one contractor — unless the master owns a majority. Majority ownership is exactly what you're selling.
How buyers really get found
Packaging the business, handling initial inquiries, and controlling information flow to protect confidentiality from your competitors and employees.
View Stage Details →You've been handed an LOI
The critical juncture. The moment you sign this, your leverage shifts to the buyer. Every term in this document will cost you or protect you later.
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What exclusivity in an LOI actually costs you
The moment you sign, your leverage shifts to the buyer. Here's how to price the risk.
The LOI is an art form
The nonbinding label on the front page describes the half of the document that isn't costing you anything. The skill is knowing what must be settled before exclusivity begins.
Where deals get re-traded
The grueling process where the buyer's team of accountants and lawyers tear apart your business looking for reasons to lower the purchase price.
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The terms that didn't make it into the agreement
The email chain where you and the buyer agreed to something is not a backup copy of your deal. If a term didn't make it into the purchase agreement, it isn't part of the transaction.
What a quality of earnings report can do to your deal
An adjustment to EBITDA doesn't cost you the adjustment. It costs you the adjustment times the multiple — and it arrives while you're in exclusivity.
The paperwork that decides what you keep
The definitive agreements, the schedules, the indemnities, and the working capital true-up. The paperwork that decides what you actually keep.
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Why your working capital peg matters more than your multiple
Owners often negotiate the multiple for weeks while the working capital true-up quietly receives far less attention. Here's why the peg deserves equal scrutiny.
The Only Number That Matters Is the One That Lands
Every sale has two numbers: the headline price and what actually lands in your account. The distance between them is negotiable — if you see the bridge early.
Nobody prepares you for the year after
The transition period, the earnout metrics, and the reality of waking up without the company you built.
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The deal isn't over when the money lands
For most sellers there's a period — ninety days to a year, sometimes longer — where you're not running the company anymore, but you're not finished with it either.
Moving the money somewhere safe
Where you park the proceeds is beside the point. What actually protects the money is knowing, before it lands, what you might owe — and in what currency.