How can you find and court and win over the right buyer for your transportation business? Searching out the potential buyer who has the most to gain from your transportation business for sale can mean a higher price and satisfactory terms in your business sale.
1. Value Your Business for Sale
Only once you have a clear view of your business’s value can you effectively attempt to appeal to prospective buyers. Getting a realistic view of your transportation business’s true value can be difficult, if you go it on your own. The complicated process of pricing a transportation business includes short- and long-term profit potential based on issues such as legal and tax history, location, market demand, types of vehicles, and reputation. As independent transportation industry specialists, The Tenney Group offers a fair and accurate transportation business valuation we like to call our TransValuation. We consider each of the unique characteristics of your business as well as produce an estimate that will help us work with you to arrive at a reasonable asking price.
2. Reach Ideal Buyers
The typical first-time seller markets a transportation business for sale in a way that’s fairly unlikely to reach or appeal to ideal buyers. Often, the process involves the following steps:
- Place an ad in an area newspaper
- Place an ad in a trade magazine
- Place an ad on a business sale website
- Wait
- Place an ad in another area newspaper
- Wait
- Place an ad in another trade magazine
- Wait
- Place an ad on another business sale website
- Wait
- Wait some more
Often, such ads are as likely to reach an ideal buyer as a falling star has of fulfilling a whispered wish: It does happen, but it is not the best strategy. Instead, The Tenney Group provides an extensive database of industry contacts, allowing us to solicit offers from buyers with the most to gain from acquiring your transportation business for sale. The result is often heightened buyer interest and sale price.
3. Keep the Potential Sale Confidential
Most public marketing eliminates the possibility of confidentiality. At worst, this information leak can negatively impact your business’s value. The news of a pending sale can shake the confidence of employees as well as customers, which can lead to competitors’ gaining the upper hand. Instead of risking such problems, a transportation broker can limit knowledge of your business’s pending sale to serious buyers, streamlining the sale process.
A highly effective way to promote such a scenario is to hire a transportation industry specialist, such as The Tenney Group, to help you avoid common pitfalls and narrow your scope to potential buyers most likely to close a deal.
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