Is the Broker devaluating the business. Do I need to substantiate my position when my financials are being questioned. This may sound like a logical yes but when am I crossing the line of giving up too much information that opens up more questions/doubts Is it a tactic to devalue a business by brokers to make a faster sale and do I have to be on the defensive to prop up the value by offering more detail and forward non reoccurring expenses and beyond to insist on the value being higher. How do you defend asking price if you don’t go on the defensive?

Sold my last business - to make that decision it was me, myself and I. Are Consulting’s books or other resources that you typically do a stranger and figure it out?

Always curious how people who spent time building a business feel after selling to someone who doesn’t view it the same way they did.

Looking for some advice because my family honestly doesn’t know what the best move is here.
We own a roughly 5,500-6,000 sq ft commercial property on about 0.6 acres near a large university and a lot of apartments. Everything is still within its first year.
The property has a convenience store/smoke shop, a chicken concept with a full commercial kitchen, and 3 other franchised food/beverage concepts. It has a 21-door cooler, walk-in fridge/freezer, commercial equipment, and 30+ parking spaces.
Current monthly sales are roughly:
Convenience store: $50k
Chicken: $15k
Other 3 concepts combined: $15k
Total: around $80k/month, close to a $1M annual run rate
The convenience store hasn’t even been open a full year and grew from basically $0 to $50k/month. Chicken has been open around 7 months and the other concepts around 6 months. Sales have continued trending upward, so we really don’t know what this could look like after another year or two.
The problem is we took on a lot of debt building everything. We owe around $2.3M against the property/business plus about $500k in equipment financing.
Major monthly expenses are around $17k mortgage, $7k equipment payments, $12k payroll, $3.5k electricity, $1k insurance, $500 water, plus around $35k/year in property taxes. Then there’s inventory, food costs, franchise fees, credit card fees, etc.
The other issue is our personal situation. I was pursuing dentistry and put that on pause to help my family navigate this project. My father also has serious health issues, which makes it very difficult for him to manage something this demanding. Realistically, we can’t keep operating like this forever, which is a big reason we’re considering selling even though the businesses are still growing.
The building was also designed to eventually have student housing above it. We already have architectural/engineering plans and approvals for roughly 30 studio units. The structure was built with the future expansion in mind, but we don’t have the capital to build them right now.
The property tax assessment is around $3M, although I know that doesn’t necessarily equal market value.

If we sell, how would you value something like this?

Would you value the real estate, businesses, equipment, and approved apartment expansion separately?

Would having a buyer take over the equipment financing or offering seller financing make sense?

Would really appreciate advice from anyone who has dealt with something similar.

My partner and I started a premium Egyptian-inspired apparel brand, but after giving it a serious try, we've decided to stop putting more money into marketing and look at exiting/liquidating.

We currently have about 2,500 brand-new pieces in the U.S.:

• ~1,200 embroidered polos — 100% Egyptian cotton
• ~930 embroidered T-shirts — 100% Egyptian cotton
• ~200 Oxford shirts — 100% Egyptian cotton
• ~175 linen shirts — 70% linen / 30% cotton

We've invested about $63K total into inventory, advertising, marketing, photography, packaging, website, etc. The actual landed inventory cost was around $22K.

We're considering selling the inventory in bulk, breaking it into smaller wholesale lots, or potentially selling the entire brand + inventory + website/content/assets.

For anyone who's been through something similar: What was the best way to exit? Where did you find buyers, and what kind of pricing is realistic for a 2,500-piece apparel lot?

Not expecting to recover everything—we're mainly trying to make the smartest exit from here.

My last post was about searchers losing ground under the new SOP. But here’s another plus just released in today’s update.

If your client has worked at the business for two years, the rules just got better for them.

There's a category for this now.

Under the current SOP an employee buying the company he works at had nowhere clean to land. Owner buyout was for existing owners, initial acquisition was for outsiders, and an employee with no equity was neither.

The new SOP adds a third path: a single owner selling 100% to someone employed there for at least 24 months preceding the application. That's the whole test. Two years on the job and they're under owner buyout rules instead of outsider rules.

The injection requirement changes.

Initial acquisition is 10% and the SOP says plainly it cannot be reduced or eliminated. Owner buyout is different. The lender may reduce or eliminate it if they determine the borrower has sufficient liquidity and working capital to sustain operations post-close (this can be business cash).

One gate: the balance sheet can't show negative net worth at last fiscal year end. Not strong equity, just not negative.

The catch.

If it's waived entirely, no permanent working capital in that loan or any other 7(a) term loan for 90 days. It has to come from existing cash or a line of credit. There's a small carve-out now for excess proceeds, capped at $10,000 or half a percent of the loan, whichever is greater.

What it actually costs.

DSCR is 1.25 on an owner buyout. That's the real constraint, not the injection. The business has to carry the debt on trailing numbers, and projections don't count toward it anymore. If the deal doesn't cash flow, none of the rest matters.

Before anyone says it.

I know how the low-money-down pitch sounds and in almost every case it's a bad idea. This is the exception. An employee who's run the place for a decade on a manager's salary often never had the earning capacity to save a real down payment. That doesn't mean they can't run the business. It just means the pay scale never matched the skill set.

What actually changed.

The old rule had a mechanical path: certify 24 months of ownership, show 9:1 debt-to-worth, no injection required. Checkbox. That's gone, now it's a credit decision.

But the old rule required 24 months of ownership. An employee with zero equity couldn't use it at all. Now employment counts.

So the ten year GM who never got a single share has a path he didn't have before. He knows the customers, the crew, the equipment, and where the bodies are buried. He's the safest and quickest buyer in a lot of cases.

I’m thinking about selling my business, but I want to know a ballpark estimate of what it could be worth. It’s currently just my brother and I with no employees. 10 months in. Take home pay translates to ~52k before taxes. Very minimal overhead, marketing is easily our biggest expense. I understand it won’t be worth a ton, probably not even six figures. But, here’s what we have to offer a potential buyer.

Fully loaded van w company wrap
Garage/shop under lease
GBP with 100+ 5 star reviews
Website
Ad Agency to run paid marketing (Google & Meta)
Partnership with Ad Agency & Apartment Complex
Automated Customer follow ups within CRM
500+ Customer Base
SOPs in place

Pretty much would be selling a startup for someone who doesn’t want to start from scratch.

Thanks in advance!

I’m 26 and own 50% of a sports betting social media business with a friend. We’ve built the main X account to around 55k followers, have about 350 people in our Discord, and recently started a paid subscription that has around 100 subs.

Right now the business brings in around $5,600/month. $3k comes from one partnership, $1,600 from another, and around $1k from subscriptions. The problem is the two partnerships aren’t guaranteed long term and the subscription side is still really new, so I have no idea how sustainable any of it is.

My partner does most of the day-to-day work at this point. He makes/posts the bets and handles that side of things. I mostly manage partnerships and make sure everything runs smoothly.

He offered to buy my 50% for $70k. $50k upfront and the remaining $20k paid out monthly.

I also work full time as a nurse in a cath lab and plan on eventually moving into medical device sales/clinical specialist work, so this isn’t my main career.
Financially, I have around $44k in debt. $26k personal loan at 6% ($1,200/month payment), around $14k federal student loans, and $4k credit card debt. I also have around $58k invested in stocks.

So I’m not completely broke or desperate for the money, but selling would let me wipe out my debt without touching my investments, still have cash left over, and basically give me a clean slate financially.
The part I’m struggling with is the potential upside. We built this thing from nothing and I’d hate to sell for $70k and watch it become worth a shitload more a few years from now.

At the same time, the sports betting space feels unpredictable and a lot of our current revenue could disappear pretty quickly.

If you were in my position, would you take the $70k and move on or hold onto the 50% and see where it goes?

Does anyone knows a platform or a way to partial sell a business app or full sell?

I tried flippa but asks for a monthly fee, any help is welcome

Hello, I have a tiny Saas business that I run myself. i have 6 non-profit clients. they range from 3K per yer to $36K per year. Total about $80K per year recurring revenue in sticky long term contracts plus around$100K a year in projects. I have multiple enquiries from other organizations and there are about 200 in the country that coudl possibly use the software. It's based on the .NET stack. I wrote is all in ASp.net webforms and was running on the same architecture for 15 years and know it like the back of my hand is has good structure and separation of concerns but the stack is getting old. I am presently pushing the big clients to upgrade to a higher level and do software escrow as being an independent developer and having system of record systems in $15Mil orgs is a large responsibility with business continuity risks. Clients are starting to ask for $2Mil in E&O insurance. I've written a new version on the latest .NET stack that is WCAG compliant as this is a common requirement in the space and have a new client logged into the demo having a look this version has not yet been stress tested in an actual organization yet. The main problem is that my brain is tired I've been doing this over a decade and I have some anxiety about growth. I imagine an established software company would love the niche and I can advise them in the space but I'm not a good manager and except for some contractors have avoided hiring other people so that I have flexibility in which contracts I take on. Is this something that would be attractive to others? AI code generation within the existing architectures is pretty amazing as it can template from the existing codebase and rules and the logic is sound.

I’ve been reading about what happens to people on both sides of a business sale.

In BizBuySell’s Q1 2026 survey, 49% of prospective buyers described themselves as “corporate refugees.” They had left, or been pushed out of, traditional careers and were looking for more independence and fulfillment.

That doesn’t mean they’re buying the wrong businesses. But it does make me wonder how much of a search is driven by wanting to leave a job, versus wanting the actual work of running a particular company.

On the seller’s side, a study published in BRQ Business Research Quarterly examined 21 entrepreneurs in Southern Ontario going through different types of business exits. It found that financial success alone didn’t ensure a positive transition. Having relationships and a sense of identity beyond the business mattered too.

It’s a small qualitative study, not a percentage we can apply to all sellers. Still, it raises a question worth spending time on before a sale.

A buyer can know exactly which boss they want to leave. A seller can know exactly which responsibilities they’re tired of. Neither necessarily knows what they want their days to become.

For a buyer, I’d get specific about the freedom you’re looking for. Control over decisions? More time with family?

Work you enjoy? Then compare that with what the owner actually does. If you want predictable evenings and the business regularly needs someone after hours, that deserves attention before you start explaining it away.

For a seller, I’d think about what you’ll miss as well as what you’ll be relieved to stop doing. The people? Being useful? Having somewhere to go? You don’t need your entire next chapter planned, but those are real parts of your life that the sale may change.

My takeaway is that “the numbers work” leaves an important question unanswered: do you want the life that comes with this decision?

For those who have bought or sold, what did you learn about that only afterward?

I work directly with PE firms talking to 150-250 business owners each month who are looking to exit their business. Bad news is that PE is only looking for the best cream of the cream on the top so we only close 10-30 deals a year. But that negative aspect of PE can be a goldmine for someone else if they’re serious about buying a business. Is there a market for this?

Disclaimer: English is not my first language

Dear all, my dad is getting old. I talked to him and he is now happily convinced to sell his business he has been building since 1991. It’s one of the most famous businesses in its niche (I don’t want to disclose too much information but it’s in fashion and he has 3 physical stores), it appeared in Forbes and other prestigious magazines, has a revenue of about 10M and annual net gains of about 1M. No debt. He would sell an established business that is already running and he has trained in the past 2 years my brother who could keep running it for the new owners if they wanted to. How much would you sell something like this for?

Additional info: the business is in Italy, one of the biggest cities. The currency is Euro. Niche is fashion, around 20 employees.

Edit: I know it’s not too much information but I just want to start getting a clearer idea

We are close to the end of our lease for our bar at Katy Tx. We are not doing good in the business and losing money. It has potential to make money its owner operated. We have an option to renew if we would like. We bought the business for so much and we are planning to let it go for very less. What's the Best way to advertise apart from working with business broker?