Still for sale

A business can be for sale for a surprisingly long time.

Six months becomes twelve.
The memorandum is updated.
The broker changes the headline.
Another buyer signs the NDA.

The company is still there.

At some point, the market is no longer failing to understand the opportunity. It may simply understand it differently from the seller.

Small businesses are often priced as if the years spent building them were an asset the buyer inherits.

They are not.

The buyer inherits the customers who remain, the employees who stay, the contracts that survive the handover, the cash the business can actually produce and the problems that arrive with the keys.

Everything else belongs to the seller’s memory.

The same applies to the process.

An NDA is not a transaction.
An investor profile is not a transaction.
A financing confirmation is not a transaction.
Ten interested parties are not a transaction.

A signed purchase agreement is.

For businesses below a few million in revenue, the cost of pretending otherwise becomes expensive very quickly. There may be only a handful of credible buyers. Making each of them prove themselves repeatedly does not increase the value of the company.

Sometimes it only exhausts the market.

If a business has been offered for eighteen months and remains unsold, the interesting question is no longer how many buyers have looked at it.

It is what every one of them saw.