JPAbusiness

When business owners come to see us, wanting to sell their business, we often get involved in providing what we term ‘vendor due diligence’.

When conducting vendor due diligence for clients, our role is basically to ‘pretend’ we are the buyer.

We look at a range of business health factors including:

• financial performance
• business performance
• staff and organisational aspects
• contracts, systems and suppliers
• how the business creates and drives value in terms of its point of difference in the market
• forward order book i.e. the pipeline, to understand the true nature of the business as a going concern
• how exposed the business might be to individuals or particular customers or suppliers.

We have helped some clients find the right business within six months while, for other clients, it has taken over three years.

The key phrase is ‘the right business’; I’m sure we could speed up the process if our aim was just to help our clients buy ‘a’ business, but that’s not our job.

In this video I explain why it's important not to rush into buying a business, and share four tips for managing risk during the business buying process.

In a perfect world, business owners would be preparing their businesses for sale from the moment they established or purchased them. For example:

• important business structures, systems and processes would be carefully devised and executed from day one;
• succession plans would be in place and understood by senior members of the team;
• clearly worded partnership agreements would reduce the chance of misunderstandings on exit, and so on…

When business owners come to see us, wanting to sell their business, we often get involved in providing ‘vendor due diligence’.

This basically involves us 'pretending' we're a buyer and has two main components:

1. Understanding what the business is really worth i.e. conducting an independent valuation or market appraisal

2. Understanding how the business appears to a potential purchaser.

That second component is the core part of vendor due diligence and involves looking at the business from a purchaser’s point of view:

We provide a range of services to business buying clients, from initial review and feasibility, through to business valuations, a preliminary assessment of the strength of the opportunity, full due diligence services if the party has lodged a non-binding offer and is seriously interested in the business, through to merger and acquisition facilitation services.

We have helped some clients find the right business within six months while, for other clients, it has taken over three years.

The key phrase is ‘the right business’; I’m sure we could speed up the process if our aim was just to help our clients buy ‘a’ business, but that’s not our job.

When business owners come to see us, wanting to sell their business, we often get involved in providing what we term ‘vendor due diligence’.

Vendor due diligence has two main components:

1. Understanding what my business is really worth

This is something we have covered previously in eBooks and blogs about business valuation and market appraisals.
It involves getting independent advice on what your business is really worth in the market, on a realistic, fair value market basis.

When business owners come to see us, wanting to sell their business, we often get involved in providing what we term ‘vendor due diligence’.

When conducting vendor due diligence for clients, our role is basically to ‘pretend’ we are the buyer.

We look at a range of business health factors including:

• financial performance
• business performance
• staff and organisational aspects
• contracts, systems and suppliers
• how the business creates and drives value in terms of its point of difference in the market
• forward order book i.e. the pipeline, to understand the true nature of the business as a going concern
• how exposed the business might be to individuals or particular customers or suppliers.

Preparation is a critical component of a successful business sale and you can't start preparing too early.

With this in mind we have created a new eBook for our readers and subscribers: How to Prepare Your Business for Sale.