The Dos And Don’ts Of Selling Your Business

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Barnett. He’s an author, speaker, educator, consultant, business buy, sell process coach who works with people to help them prepare and sell their businesses privately or buy a business privately or via business broker. So we’re gonna talk about selling your business. So if you’re one of those business owners out there that you think maybe someday you wanna do that, listen in today. So welcome David. Hey, thanks for having me, John. So let’s just start with that, you know, business owner who has the notion, gosh, I think I wanna sell my business. What are really some of the steps when somebody comes to you maybe and says that, what are some of the steps you have to say, well, hang on a second, we need to do X, Y, and Z to get your business ready.

(01:38): Yeah, sure. So basically it’s a giant exercise in empathy and understanding the position of the buyer . Yeah. Just like every business thinks about their customers and what their customer wants, when you wanna sell your business, you are basically entering the same kind of world, but instead of your product or service, it’s your business. Now that is the item of objective inventory, if you will, that you’re trying to, you know, promote and sell to the buyer. And so what that feature is that makes somebody wanna buy the business is the cash flow that the business produces. And so people are gonna look at that cash flow and they’re going to, they’re gonna use all kinds of different methods and there’s many different ways to do this, but they’re gonna figure out what that cash flow is worth to them. That’s the very first thing. So the business produces, you know, $200,000 of earnings for its owner every year.

(02:28): That’s the cash flow, and they’ll pay some multiple upon that. And it’s all based on the perception of risk in the industry. So the multiple paid for the septic pumping company is gonna be a much higher multiple than the multiple paid for a restaurant. Mm-hmm. Scroll back to top