Guide
How to sell a business without a broker or an M&A advisor
Updated
No law requires you to use an intermediary to sell your own company. What the process does require is that somebody does the work, and if it is not them, it is you.
What you take on
- Finding and qualifying buyers
- Research, approach, and the discipline to check that a buyer can actually fund the deal before you open the books.
- Confidentiality
- Non-disclosure agreements before anything commercially sensitive moves, and a plan for what staff, customers and suppliers are told and when.
- The information pack
- Three years of clean accounts, normalised earnings, a customer concentration analysis and an honest answer to why you are selling.
- Process control
- Keeping several parties moving to the same timetable is the single hardest part to do alone, and it is exactly what creates competitive tension.
- Diligence and legal
- Not optional and not self-servable. Budget for a corporate solicitor and, above modest sizes, financial due diligence support.
When going it alone is genuinely sensible
- The buyer is already known: a competitor, a customer, a supplier, your management team or a family member.
- The business is small enough that intermediary fees would be a large fraction of the proceeds.
- You have sold a business before and know what heads of terms, warranties and a disclosure letter do.
- Speed and confidentiality outrank price, and you accept that trade explicitly.
Where owners lose money doing it themselves
Three failures repeat. Negotiating price before anyone has explained how deferred consideration and earn-outs actually pay out, so the headline number is not the number received. Signing exclusivity too early and too long, which removes the only leverage you had. And letting the buyer's advisors set the timetable, because a deal that drifts past your year end gets repriced on the new numbers.
If you start alone and find you have three interested parties, that is the moment to reconsider. Running competing bidders against each other is the part of the job worth paying for, and it is very hard to do while also running the business. See which model fits your sale.