When Selling a Business: Data You’ll Provide to Your California Business Broker | The Board Magazine

When Selling a Business: Data You’ll Provide to Your California Business Broker | The Board Magazine

by admin on August 5, 2010

When you initiate your process with an M&A Advisor (California Business Broker) to sell your business, he or she will ask you several questions about your business and your goals. There are two important reasons we ask as many questions as we do:

* Your California Business Broker needs every bit of data that is relevant to the buyer. This speeds up and reduces the amount of due diligence and ensures that the buyer won’t have any objections.
* Your M&A Advisor will also need the information for the marketing of your business.

To be ready is to be successful. The goal is to get it all ready to go right up front before the buyer, bankers and investors ask for the information. This is how we’ll make sure that the deal runs smoothly, and it’s how we’ll make sure that you come away with the best deal, and that we close the deal.
What You’ll Provide About Your Business

What you see next is a summary outline of the data you’ll provide about your business when we get things rolling.
Company Organization and History

* The complete history and timeline of your company
* How your business is structured, and the ownership
* Your latest organization chart
* A copy of your most important staff, any issues you might have about your employees, and what these people do on a day-to-day basis

Information About Your Products and Services

* Make a list of your main products and services
* Write a complete description of these products and services
* Now, write the timelines of these same services and products
* And prepare a analysis of the competition
* Get all your licences, patents, etc. arranged
* Make sure that you’ve got your product delivery methods well-defined
* Put all your warranties accessible
* And, make a complete assessment of your technology

An Analysis of Your Industry

* Write a summary of your industry
* Discuss the different trends that are going on in your industry
* Write what you see for the future of your industry
* Describe the demographics of your industry
* Discuss the general concerns of your industry

Understanding a bit about Your Customers

* Who are your key customers?
* How do they pay you?
* Have you recently lost any primary customers?
* What new major customers have you recently added?
* What is the buying cycle of your major customers

Getting the scoop of your Sales and Marketing

* Let us see your sales and marketing plans
* Provide a full description of your marketing and sales tactics
* Discuss your sales team with us
* What type of advertising and promotion do you do?
* Describe your distribution channels in full.

What About Your Competition?

* Who are your most important competitors?
* Will your key accounts jump ship?
* How do you think your competitors will react?

And, There’s More…

You’ll also provide details about:

* Your Suppliers and Vendors
* Your buildings and facilities
* Everything about your equipment
* Lots of information/data about you
* And, finally, you’ll provide detailed data about your financial records, business, and inventory

Summary

As you can see, our data search goes both deep and broad. When selling a business, we try to make the process simple, and that requires as much data about your company up front as possible. This guarantees that the buyer will have all the information he or she needs to breeze through the due diligence steps and will come to closure more quickly. As business brokers and M&A Advisors, we want to guarantee that the selling process goes as smoothly as possible.