Preparing For Sale

Boosting Your Valuation

Our goal is to thoroughly evaluate your business on your behalf so we can help you maximize its worth while we assist you along the path to its sale on your terms.

Sterner Consulting focuses on providing high quality advisory services to business owners who are ready to sell their business. Our goal is to secure the right buyer at the right price, and do it in a timely manner. We sort through and organize all the pieces of this puzzle to help you achieve your goals. To accomplish our objectives, we apply proven business brokering strategy to each area of expertise so that we become an invaluable resource that you can rely on to navigate the complicated and continuously evolving marketplace.

Eight Ways To Boost Valuation

If you are planning to sell your business there are things you can do to increase its valuation (or perceived value). Below is a list of eight strategies that can help boost your valuation (in no particular order of importance):

1) Improve revenue

2) Improve operating margins
– Productivity
– Net profit
– Price earnings multiple
– EBIT (earnings before interest and tax) multiples

3) Improve business assets (i.e., intellectual property) and make the business sustainable
– Clearly document methodologies or standard operating procedures
(do you have a secret “X factor”?)
– Create templates (i.e., stationery, forms, procedure docs)
– Document business systems (i.e., workflow, accounts)

4) Clean up exposure to risks and liabilities, including management, commercial, and legal risks
– Document informal arrangements (i.e., turn them into contracts)
– Review existence and adequacy of insurance policies
– Bring tax reporting, payments, and company regulatory compliance up to date

5) Collaborate with others, form strategic business relationships and work towards “open innovation”

6) Re-align business with industry leaders in “industries” with higher valuation multiples

7) Solidify your business development strategy, or your commercialization strategy

8) Seek two or more buyers to gain from price competition or auctions between them

The Best Time to Sell

The best time to sell a business is when you have it running like a finely-tuned, highly-efficient money-making machine. However, even if your business isn’t at the peak it’s game, almost any business can be sold, even if it is not doing as well as it once did, if the sale is handled professionally and the deal is priced correctly.

According to this article from Inc Magazine, now might be the best time to sell your business due to the Aging U.S. Population, Lower than Average Interest Rates, Low Inflation and Lower Taxes.

We know you may have emotional ties that are holding you back. It’s your baby. You built it from scratch. You inherited it from your parents. Smart business people look at their companies as nothing more than assets. We are compassionate Consultants that will assist you through this process so you may profit for your future nest egg. Anyone who knows anything about business knows that you buy low and sell high. Now, just may be that selling-high time!