Selling your business?

Selling Your Business – Some helpful hints

Maximise the selling price of your business before you list it for sale. Listing your business for sale without checking the things purchasers will look for first will cause you problems. The sale will fall over or you will have to accept a lower price. Maximise your sale price and safeguard your sale from falling over by properly preparing your business before you sell it.

Here is one example: Mr A wanted to buy a business. The name on the contract was not registered. This meant that the business name could not be transferred because the seller of the business did not own it.  Was the business registered as a trademark ? No.  Worse, there was an existing registered trademark (not the seller) almost identical to the name of the business being sold. This effectively meant that Mr A could not register the business name as a trademark after purchasing the business, because of an pre-existing almost identical trademark belonging to some one else. The lease also had less than a year to run with no option to renew.

What should the owner have done? Getting their trademark registered would have been a good idea. If not possible with the existing name, re-branding and registereing a business name an trademark. Approaching the landlord for a new term on the lease, preferably with an option. Make the best possible deal you can and then sell ito to the purchaser.

A purchaser does not want to buy a business and then have to worry about registering a new business name and trademark and negotiate a new lease. These are things that the seller is better placed to do. They have known the landlord for longer and presumably have a bit of good will up their sleeve.

When someone buys the business, they expect to have ownership of the name and a decent amount of time left to run on the lease.