Why Do Business Sales Fall Apart After Both Sides Agree?
The short answer: About half of all business sales that reach the due diligence phase never close. The most common reasons have nothing to do with price — they’re due diligence surprises, messy financials, customer concentration, disagreements over reps and warranties, and sellers who weren’t fully ready to sell. Most of these problems are fixable, but only if you find them before...Read More
How to Evaluate a Business Before You Buy It
The short answer: Evaluating a business before buying it means digging into five core areas: the financials, the seller’s motivation, operational risks, customer concentration, and whether the asking price is grounded in reality. Most Main Street businesses in Indiana sell for 2–3x seller’s discretionary earnings (SDE), and due diligence typically takes 30 to 90 days. A deal that...Read More
How to Negotiate the Sale of Your Business
The short answer: Skilled negotiation typically moves the final sale price of a business by 8–15% above what a seller would achieve without it — and on terms like deal structure, earn-outs, and tax allocation, the variance can be even higher. On a $2M Indiana business, that’s $160K to $300K decided at the negotiating table, not in the marketing phase. The seven strategies below are the...Read More
Selling a Family Business
Selling a Family Business in Indiana: What Happens When Succession Doesn’t Go as Planned You built something worth keeping. The plan was always to hand it down — to a son, a daughter, maybe a nephew who’s been working the floor since he was sixteen. But somewhere along the way, that plan got complicated. Maybe the kids aren’t interested. Maybe they’re interested but...Read More
