It’s important to know when is the best time to sell a business, for many reasons including market trends, and other things can determine that you can benefit much more or less depending on when you sell up and this will be key especially when approaching retirement. It will be key to look at how much you’ll need to retire on and this will tell you how much you might want or need to make from a business sale.
Get your business valued regularly
It’s important to make sure you regularly know what your business is worth as this will inform your plans not only on whether right now is the best time to sell your business but also whether the value is trending upwards or downwards, this will also give you an idea of the seasonal trends that might present in various industries. An easy way of finding out a rough value of the business is to ask your accountant, they should be able to give a rough snapshot of where it’s at right now, or you could get it valued by a firm specialising in valuations.
Should you advertise the business for sale
This is a very good question, if the business is visibly for sale then it could affect customer confidence and could actually damage the business and decrease the value which is counter productive to what you’re trying to achieve. You can always make the sale proposal more discreet by contacting directly other operators in your industry to sound out who might be interested in a purchase.
Look at the business sale in context of everything else
The sale of your business must be looked at in context of all your other assets and retirement planning, what investments and pensions have you got and what value is in your property, you can actually release some of this value through firms who specialise in key retirement planning and who are expert in this type of thing. What you need to do is come up with a comprehensive plan to see if the business sale is best done now or later.
What would you do after the sale for work
Depending on how far away from retirement you are the question of what to do for work might be a pertinent one. You may need to have a few years of income to top up before you retire or you amy just want to continue working as you enjoy the routine and having something to do every day.
What about not selling in retirement
What about the option of retiring but not selling the business, this is an option that might be worth exploring and you’d need to look at hiring someone to run the business in your retirement. The idea of having the business run for you and seeing the profits come in while you are relaxing, but it’s important to consider what the repercussions could be if you don’t get the right person in, they need to be competent, honest and reliable or the dream could crumble and you could be drawn back into running the business again or even worse lose everything.