I had meetings with potential buyers and received a LOI (letter of intent) at a price I was comfortable with.
After that came 6 or 7 months of due diligence! I wasn’t expecting the process to last that long, but the buyer took time to interview my employees and secure a loan. At the end of each month I’d have to update my complete financial statements and the buyer would have to review them and they’d get submitted to the loan application.
Finally, the sale closed and I received a wire transfer.
I stayed on working for free (or maybe minimum wage?) FT for about a month, then part time for another month or two, and then finally on call for 1hr/week but no official office hours for another few months, just to make sure all the operations and handoff went smoothly. 6mo after the close I was officially done.
My main takeaway: first ensure the company is optimised for sellability.
And your question is answered too: agents. There are people and companies specialized in selling companies. Just like there are people specialized in buying companies.
there are a lot of things you can do easily early on but become very hard later:
- ensure the culture of the company doesn't require you to be there for it to function
- make sure your incorporation structure is amenable to selling easily
- separate out the accounts (both bank account and SaaS/PaaS/Iaas accounts) from day one, separate from any of your other projects
Just want to second this.
I've read several books on this topic. Warrillow's is easily the best.
It sounds planned in hindsight but it was pure luck. None of us had any idea how to do it. The reason luck was in our favor was because it wasn't a 1-man show, our location, aiming our communications not just at customers but always keep in mind our competitors and potential investors will (and should) hear us too.
We started eating our competitors lunch so they did have no choice but to take an interest. First we were an annoyance a few years later we had offers to discuss, then it became once or twice a year. We took every opportunity to engage but only for getting to know them but didn't take it further.
We were very visible because there were 3 of us in 3 different countries "making lot of noise" about our product.
Also timing wasn't good yet (why sell today when you know you'll be worth 5x in 2 years).
We went for ~5 years without considering selling and always positioned ourselves to eventually sell from the day we founded the business. If you think about selling when you're just starting, you end up constantly thinking if the company can be easily understood by an auditor and explained to an interested party.
We (3 partners) were already present in 3 countries/sites from the beginning so there was potential of messy "organic growth". And the only way to fix this do this was with a holding company.
- holding company to keep things simple and easy to explain and audit, e.g.:
- No difference in the contracts with our individual CEO's / sites that have to be negotiated individually when the company is acquired/sold
- an investor that takes over the holding has the keys to the kingdom
- all important negotiations done in the holding
The holding also made sense because it allowed us a presence in a 4th jurisdiction that is known to have a high density of investors and none of us would feel the main site is in one of the 3 jurisdictions that the partners were. So it kept things neutral.
Another thing we did right was never touch things we weren't experts in at least not until we had the first hire to move this forward internally, so we hired one of the big 4 to help with controlling & finance.
We had lots of internal bickering, I hated the idea of all this complexity with the holding, and the whole thing almost went tits-up before we even started. But implementing a holding within the first few months was the single most important decision for us. We might have gotten lucky without but not for the same returns.
I have only looked around in guest mode/logged out and haven't paid or anything to actually speak to the seller and get a fuller picture.
Are you happy with your purchases so far? What advice can you give me as a person that has a similar plan?
Lots of people simply like to jump from project to project so being able to exit a business is great for them. Other people are retiring or get sick. Sometimes the business plateaus and they have owned it for several years and are tired of planning more articles for that niche. Some built it recently for the purpose of selling and it has terribly quality content and will likely tank in traffic in the next 12 months.
You also can't trust the seller when they say how many hours they work or believe they account for all their expenses (which is sort of a joke for content businesses anyways because almost all the expenses are added back in when accounting for the sale price anyways).
But for the type of businesses on there it doesn't really matter what the seller says, most of it is noise.
You can get all the insight you need into a content business using Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and manually looking at it.
I built a content site from scratch for ~1 year before buying any and was looking at ones for sale during that time so by the time I went to pull the trigger I was "relatively sophisticated". Actually I only bought them in the last few months but so far so good, everything has been as expected. I'm strategically merging them into a single larger site and that is going well (one already successfully merged but waiting for ad network approval for the second)
There's a few of these sites. Just search for them.
And there is also https://microacquire.com/
Also there was a lot of promotion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1396904507871793154