Business Transfer Agents vs Selling Online

Once you’ve decided to sell your business, your next big decision will be how to market it to its best advantage – and get the highest sale price, of course. The traditional approach is to commission a business transfer agent to find a buyer for you but it’s not the only way.

However online services are changing the game, offering an alternative way for people to buy and sell businesses, enabling vendors to access a much larger number of potential buyers and providing valuable market intelligence and resources for owners considering putting their business up for sale.

Naturally, there are pros and cons to everything, so it’s worth honestly assessing your requirements and working out which would be the best solution for you.

Business Transfer Agents

Listing your business with an agent is probably your default position if you already know you have neither the time nor the inclination to be involved with the sales process on a day-to-day basis. It’s also a good call if your business is large, complex and requires the services of a specialist team.

Do your homework before appointing an agent. A good agent will have intimate knowledge of the local market – you may even be able to find a company with specific experience in your industry sector. It certainly pays to spend a little time and energy looking for the right representation, as instructing an inexperienced or unprofessional agent could cost you a sale.

On the other hand, if yours is a small business, turning over less than £2m, you’re likely to make a huge saving by using an online service. This could be a traditional listing site or an interactive online service.

It could be that you prefer to conduct negotiations through an agent because they make a handy buffer but do consider what this will end up costing you. While you may value keeping your distance from proceedings, you should be aware that it will inevitably impact the speed at which a sale proceeds because there’ll be inevitable delays while your agent liaises with both parties. It’s worth reiterating that this type of service will also usually be your highest-cost option by a long way.

The reality of almost all business transfer agents is that they will charge hefty marketing fees, even if you don’t pay, they list thousands of businesses and have very small teams handling the sales – not really offering the hands-on approach you will need.

Traditional Listing Sites

These are really just a level up from the printed weeklies of old. They will generate interest in your business for sale and the established names will have a good amount of buyers on their books, but you won’t have any opportunity to interact with your prospects once your advert goes live.

Think of online listing sites as a virtual shop window. If you go down this route, you’ll be able to promote your business to a wide audience but you’ll have to be prepared to handle enquiries – requests to view, offers and negotiations and such – offline. This can quickly spiral out of control as you have a barrage of enquiries you can’t really handle.

It’ll be up to you to keep detailed written records of all your buyer enquiries and to be on your toes when negotiating with prospective buyers.

Bizdaq

Selling a business is free with Bizdaq. Bizdaq is the perfect solution if you are entrepreneurially minded with the desire to sell your own business and save money (on average, over £10K) on agent fees while enjoying access to a great deal more vendor resources than a traditional listing site. It is, quite literally, the best of both worlds!

More and more sellers are coming round to the idea of marketing their small businesses simply, quickly and cheaply, without the fuss and bother of trusting their sale to an agent who won’t be as invested in selling it as they are.

Bizdaq makes it easy to get up and running and there are lots of resources to help create and manage your listing – everything from booking in viewings to the production of essential paperwork. Bizdaq even has its own instant valuation tool calculated using your location and business type and based on an in-depth assessment of comparable businesses sales together with your own income and cash flow figures.

The seller dashboard is a godsend, providing up-to-date information on requests to view, offers and sales negotiations, making it easy to monitor activity and respond to requests. You’ll reach around 150,000 buyers and you’ll be in control of every stage of the process.

Not only is it one of the quickest, easiest and most effective ways of reaching your target audience but the potential savings are substantial and could be used towards funding your next business venture. Take a look and you’ll see why Bizdaq is changing the way people buy and sell their businesses for good.