6 Principles We Keep Coming Back to After Decades of Helping Entrepreneurs Sell Their Businesses

We recently hosted a webinar on navigating the minefield of selling your business. Michael Avery moderated, Andrew and I shared what we’ve learned across hundreds of transactions, and the conversation kept circling back to six principles that separate premium exits from disappointing ones.

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I want to share those six principles here — not as theory, but through the real situations that illustrate why each one matters.

 

1. Don’t be passive — be in control before a buyer arrives.

 

A business owner I spoke to recently had been approached by a buyer. Unsolicited. Flattering. He spent months — eventually years — in conversation with that single buyer, responding to requests for information, answering questions, making himself available. The buyer controlled the pace, the agenda, and the flow of information. By the time an offer finally landed, it looked nothing like the deal he’d been imagining for two years.

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He wasn’t passive because he was lazy. He was passive because the approach felt like progress. It wasn’t. It was a buyer running the process on their terms because nobody was running it on his.

 

2. Create real choice by approaching enough buyers.

 

A sanitation services business came to us convinced they’d created competitive tension. They’d spoken to four or five potential acquirers. That felt like a market process to them.

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It isn’t. In a typical Deal Leaders process, we’ll approach between 50 and a hundred qualified buyers and generate five or six serious offers. Speaking to four or five buyers isn’t creating choice — it’s having a handful of conversations and hoping one of them works out. The difference between hope and competitive tension is about ninety-five more conversations.

 

3. Invest in preparation — because once trust is lost, you don’t get it back.

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I see this constantly. A business owner decides they want to sell, bumps into someone who could be a buyer, and blurts out their interest on the spot. No preparation. No financial narrative. No information memorandum. They stitch together a half-baked story, attach their audited financials, and send it across.

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It doesn’t work. And it’s not just the seller who makes this mistake — many advisors do too. They treat the information memorandum as a brochure to attract interest, without stress-testing the numbers behind it. Then three months into the process, the buyer’s team picks up that the financials don’t stack up. From that moment, the buyer doesn’t trust anything. The deal doesn’t recover.

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Preparation isn’t just about having documents ready. It’s about having a financial story that holds up under scrutiny from the first interaction to the last.

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4. Find the right buyer, not the obvious one.

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This one always astounds me. An owner contacts the businesses that seem like the obvious acquirers — competitors, adjacent players, the names everyone would think of — and gets nothing back. Polite interest at best. No real engagement. No offers.

The problem isn’t the business. The problem is that nobody has done the work to identify who would actually pay a premium and who has the balance sheet and strategic motivation to close. Finding the right buyer requires a methodology, not a guess. The acquirer who pays the highest price is almost never the one you’d have thought of first.

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5. Build deal momentum through a structured competitive process.

 

Even some of the bigger advisory names in the market struggle with this. They can generate initial interest, but they can’t get serious responses from qualified buyers around the world in a compressed timeframe. Without that operational capability, there’s no deal heat. The meeting period stretches over months. Buyers sense there’s no urgency, no competition, and no consequence for waiting. The result is subdued offers and a string of low-balls.

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Deal heat isn’t a negotiating trick. It’s an operational capability — the ability to run a structured, simultaneous process that creates genuine competitive pressure within a defined window. The result: Get a buyer to look at the cost of NOT getting the deal, rather than only focusing on the cost of buying the business.

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6. Look beyond the obvious — but through research, not guesswork.

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When people talk about “looking beyond the obvious,” they sometimes confuse lateral thinking with wishful thinking. Just because a retailer sells pet products doesn’t mean they’d acquire a manufacturer of cat food processing equipment. That’s not creative buyer identification — it’s a waste of everyone’s time.

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Looking beyond the obvious means rigorous research into who genuinely needs what your business offers, who operates in adjacent parts of the value chain, and who has publicly committed to growth strategies your business could accelerate. It means looking internationally, where buyers may see strategic value that domestic acquirers simply can’t. Without a thorough methodology and serious research capability, “looking outside the obvious” is just a phrase on a slide.

 

The pattern underneath all six

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These aren’t six separate problems. They’re six symptoms of the same underlying issue: selling a business without a process.

The owners who achieve premium exits aren’t luckier than the ones who don’t. They’re the ones who invested in preparation, created genuine competitive tension, and positioned themselves to negotiate from strength rather than hope.

If any of these stories sound familiar — or if you’d rather they didn’t become your story — I’m always happy to have that conversation over a coffee.

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Until next time,

Rick Grantham, Deal Leaders International