Greg Kells is the Founder and President of Sunbelt Canada, the number one business brokerage in the country. He has directly facilitated the sale of over 1,000 businesses and is a two-time winner of Businessperson of the Year in Ottawa. Greg is passionate about mentoring and teaching, with experience as a guest lecturer at Harvard, Yale, Duke, and various colleges across Canada. He is active in numerous community organizations and advocates for economic empowerment, the environment, science, and technology.
A career as a business broker prepares you for negotiations regarding the sale of any company. However, business owners tend not to have this same skill set. When selling your business, you could be left uncertain, frustrated, or deadlocked about…
Considering selling your business? This can be a considerable process even before you decide to list. While determining all the details you want to include in the potential sale, you might stop and think: should I use a business broker?…
If you own a small business and require a share freeze, partnership dissolution, or are starting to exit plan for the sale of your business, the first question owners often ask themselves is, “What is my company worth?” Most accounting…
Many Canadians feel that the cost of local housing, whether purchased or rented, is beyond their means. Affordability is especially an issue in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. Less in the news are non-residential properties and the hardships their rising property taxes are causing to small businesses. It’s an expense that is causing small businesses to relocate, reconsider expansions and, in some instances, shutter, notes a recent Globe and Mail Report on Business.
You’ve never been known as someone who has trouble making decisions. But here you are swinging like a pendulum when it comes to following through on selling your business. You’ve taken your business as far as you can. You have other ideas about what you’d like to do with the rest of your life while you still have the health to act on it.
The finishing line to buying your business is in sight— you want to get there ASAP. But you can’t shorten due diligence, an important and complex part of the purchasing process. As described in Due Diligence in Buying a Business (part one), our goal is to identify any fatal flaws, verify that the information is reasonably accurate and confirm that this business will really work for us. And so, it's essential we keep to the plan our broker has set out for us.
We have successfully negotiated agreement upon an offer to buy a business based on the information our business broker and the seller have provided. This offer included many conditions that we must be satisfied with prior to closing or the offer becomes null and void and our deposit, refunded. We must now plan and execute a reasonably thorough analysis of the business and the information provided.
Guided by our business broker, we have made a conditional, non-binding offer to purchase a business at a price (below market) and terms that would work for us. We set out a time for response, a closing date, financing, training and transition, what was included and excluded, and provided a deposit for the broker to hold in trust.
