Topic
Help selling your business
When an owner starts thinking about a sale, Roland Frasier looks at it the way a buyer will: the 11 Value Killers that get a business discounted, the three years of numbers a buyer actually reads, and the strategy seat most sellers never fill between the banker and the lawyer. Selling is one of several things he works on with founders, alongside the team, the acquisitions and the systems that make a company worth competing for.
Articles
Common questions
I want to sell my business in a few years. Where do I start?
About 36 months before the sale, not six. Buyers read three years of data, so the gap between what you can credibly improve in two quarters and what they need to see across three years is exactly what gets priced against you.
What advisors do you need to sell a business, and what do they cost?
The banker is paid to close a transaction and the lawyer to draft documents. Neither is paid to design the structure, narrative, and tax architecture that decide how much of the closing wire you keep. In most lower middle market sales, nobody fills that seat.
How to increase the value of your business in the 12 months before a sale
Eleven patterns buyers discount for: founder dependency, no leadership bench, an undocumented operating system, revenue volatility, weak or fake recurring revenue, concentration risk, no differentiation, no transferability, fragile margins, misaligned leadership, and legal or financial red flags that surface in diligence. Roland Frasier calls these the 11 Value Killers, and founder dependency is the most common and the most expensive of them.
