Assembling Your Expert Team

Even if you've been a determined do-it-yourselfer from day one, selling your business is not a job you should attempt to do alone. Even for a relatively small business, there's a myriad of federal, state, and local regulations and tax issues to consider, not to mention one or more extremely important contracts to negotiate. Selling your business is something you'll probably do only once — there's no opportunity to take a trial run or build up any experience before you do the real thing.

Another consideration is that the process of selling can take a lot of time. The more involved you get with it, the less time you'll have to spend actually running the business, at the very time when you need your business to run most successfully. You'll be much better off leaving some of the work to experts who've crafted dozens of deals, instead of spending a lot of your time trying to reinvent the wheel.

There are a number of team positions that you must fill, although it's possible that the same individual or firm may fill more than one of these:

• accountant
• lawyer
• business broker
• business appraiser/valuation expert
• tax expert
• banker or other financier, if third-party funding is needed.

Not all of these positions need to be filled for every small-business sale — much depends on the size and nature of your company. However, at a minimum, you'll need to involve your lawyer and accountant. Even a small sole proprietorship will need a lawyer to look over the sales contract— if this document is not worded correctly you may not only fail to get all your money, but you can also be exposed to potentially huge liability claims by the purchaser, creditors, customers, employees, etc. The sale will have tax consequences that must be sorted out, and state laws typically require certain papers to be filed whenever a business sells all or most of its assets. If a partnership, an LLC, or a corporation is involved, the complexity of the deal will quickly mushroom.