The Messy Marketplace: Selling Your Business in a World of Imperfect Buyers

The marketplace for small and midsize businesses is messy. Having peeked behind the curtain at over 10,000 companies, this book aims to demystify the buyers, the process, and the inevitably emotional journey that is selling a company. If you're reading this, you're likely an entrepreneur, a family member or close friend of a business owner, or an advisor to an owner. Great businesses outlast individual careers, including those of owners and founders. At some point, in some way, each business must be transitioned - years pass, people age, markets change, opportunities appear - as do challenges. Selling, whether it be a stake or the whole company, often carries an unfortunate amount of stress, anxiety, and frustration. Most of the time, selling is a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, and the traditional paths are unnecessarily opaque.Do something enough and you get good at it. Just as you have built your expertise, my colleagues and I have had the privilege to peek behind the curtain at over