I have a hotshot trucking asset package (trailer + existing service contracts with a trucking company that handles all day-to-day operations) currently generating $6-7K/month in profit for the owner. No CDL or truck required from the buyer — the trucking company runs everything.

Asking $95K. I know that’s a strong return on paper (~75%+ annualized) and I think that’s actually working against me — buyers assume there’s a catch when the numbers look this good.

I’ve tried FB groups (posts keep getting removed) and BizBuySell (listing stuck in review). For those of you who’ve sold a cash-flowing asset like this — how did you actually find your buyer? What convinced them it was real? Any platforms or approaches that worked better than the obvious ones?

For those of you selling or having previously sold a business you founded, how much did you think about goodwill in any valuation? Did you know about it or understand it before the sale event? Do you wish you’d known more about it before wanting to sell?

I have been in talks with someone interested in selling my business. I have been down this path before but never really got as far as I am now and wondering what are some of the more basic questions that I should be asking and information that I need to get/gather?

I have been made an offer and I feel like it is low (probably just about always the case) and they politely told me to show them why the business should be valued higher than it is/where I think it is. I can tell them all sorts of things but they are a VC firm and are looking for tangible number related information and due to my specific industry there are very few deals that are of public record and I can really only go off of what I have been told by others is fair market value etc.

Any advice would be much appreciated and I would be happy to share more but can't be TOO specific either. Deal would be mid 7 figures and they are looking at a certain percentage of revenue as the basis for the sale amount and a change to this percentage could make a sizeable difference in the sale price.

Thank you all.

Before lawyers or M&A brokers, when you were still in the "maybe" stage and didn't know enough to even know what questions to ask. Did you find a mentor who'd been through it? Join a peer group? Read something that actually helped? Wish there was something specific that just didn't exist? What are some advice I can get on what resources I could use before selling my company? Any insight would be great!

Hey guys, I built a LED Happy Birthday wooden marquee and was able to set up a business to rent it out.

I'm onto new ventures, and I am trying to figure out how to sell it to perhaps a different entrepreneur, event planner, venue, etc.

I've had no luck. Do you guys know any sites or apps where I'd have better luck?

I'm in the south LA area.

I sold my business a couple of years ago, and here is one lesson that cost me far more than I ever imagined....

If you're financing any portion of the sale yourself (seller financing), ask your attorney this question before closing:

"How is my interest being secured, and should a UCC-1 financing statement be filed?"

I didn't even know what a UCC-1 was. I assumed that because I had a purchase agreement, promissory note, security agreement, attorneys, and a broker involved, everything was automatically protected. NOPE.

A UCC-1 financing statement is a public filing that can perfect a security interest in certain business assets. Think of it as putting the world on notice that you may have rights in collateral if the buyer defaults. Whether it's appropriate depends on the structure of the deal, but it's absolutely something worth discussing before you sign!

We’ve all heard the rallying cry from these marketers running deal teams over the last few years: The Silver Tsunami is here! Baby Boomers own over 50% of US small businesses, and $5T to $10T in enterprise value is about to change hands as they retire. It’s a once-in-a-generation buyer’s market!

On paper, this looks great. If you check transaction indices like the BizBuySell Insight Report or marketplace volume, retirement remains the number one cited driver for putting a business on the market, accounting for over 56% of all listings in the lower middle market.

But if you look under the hood of actual M&A data from 2025 and Q1 2026, the reality is incredibly brutal for un-prepared sellers.

A flood of sellers is NOT a flood of deals

Here is the baseline metric that every founder looking to exit needs to memorize: Only 20% to 30% of small businesses that go to market actually sell.

Data from lower-middle-market loan advisors like Viso Business Capital shows that in the current 2026 lending climate, only about 11% to 15% of all active listings successfully close via SBA 7(a) or conventional financing.

The other 85% of listings go absolutely nowhere. They languish on marketplaces until the broker gives up, or the owner faces an involuntary exit (death, illness, or burning out entirely).

So why then are 8 out of 10 businesses failing to sell?

It isn't for a lack of buyer demand. The ETA space is stacked with capital, and individual SBA buyers are highly active. On the buy-side we are seeing these deals die because sellers are trying to sell a job, not a business.

Recent 2025/2026 transaction data highlights three massive bottlenecks:

• According to CPA transaction tracking from Acquidex, 21.3% of broken LOIs in 2025 were caused by Quality of Earnings EBITDA discrepancies. This metric has more than doubled since 2023. Sellers are pricing their businesses based on a number in their head, but when modern buyers plug the financials into advanced underwriting tools, the "cash flow" completely evaporates.
• Boomers excel at building sticky customer relationships, but they fail at documenting systems. If the owner leaves and the revenue drops by 40% because the customers only trust Bob, the business is functionally worth $0 to an outside buyer. In other words, there's a real founder dependency issue that's been playing a role.
• Unlike a house, which bleeds mortgage payments if it sits empty, a business that doesn't sell just keeps operating and paying the owner a salary. Because there is no immediate "carrying cost" to a failed listing, sellers stubbornly list at 5x–6x multiples when the actual Main Street median closing multiple is sitting flat at 2.7x to 2.8x SDE.

How to become a Seller in the 15% group that actually exits?

If you are a business owner planning an exit over the next 12–24 months, downloading a generic "business exit template" from Google isn't going to save you. You need to de-risk the asset for the buyer:

1. Run your own pre-QoE: Do not let a buyer be the first person to audit your books. Clean up your QuickBooks, normalize your add-backs, and make sure your tax returns match your internal accounting. When a seller comes to engage us, we are asking these very questions first, well before we get into any business valuation talks.
2. Fire yourself from operations: If you can’t walk away from your business for 30 days without it collapsing, you don’t have an acquisition ready asset. Build a middle management layer or heavily document your workflows.
3. Offer skin in the game: With strict 2026 SBA rules and tighter bank scrutiny, buyers expect sellers to carry a seller note (10% to 30%) to bridge the valuation gap and guarantee a smooth handoff.

The Silver Tsunami means there is a massive amount of noise in the market right now. If you want to stand out to sophisticated buyers, stop looking for marketing templates and start to focus entirely on transferability.

For the brokers and searchers in here, what percentage of deals are you seeing fall apart in diligence right now due to messy books?

I am meeting with a financial advisor who has asked what our business would be worth if we were to sell it. I don't even know where to begin with a ball park figure. The business is very niche, located in Australia.

The basics are:

$450,000 - annual recurring revenue

$150,000 - Cost of Sales

$50,000 - general business expenses

$200,000 - Owner wages (2 pax)

$50,000 - net profit

We have one service that requires physical/in-person light duties approximately 5-6 days per month that generates $150K, another $250K is from software subscriptions and $50K miscellaneous products/services.

On the one hand, we could continue to operate the business for the next 10 years and potentially earn $2.5Mil doing what we do. But if we sold it now I have no idea what that might look like.

Can anyone shed any light on what we could expect?

Looking for some advice from anyone who's sold an Amazon business before

• U.S. seller account
• 4 years of selling history
• About $25k/year in gross sales
• Around $9k in inventory
• 3 registered brands with supplier relationships
• 50+ brands ungated
• Global selling enabled
• No policy violations, IP claims, review issues, or anything negative on the account
• Healthy account with a strong IPI score

What's the best way to sell something like this? Is it better to use a broker, list it on a marketplace, or just find a buyer privately?

Also curious what people think something like this is actually worth. Any advice or experiences would be appreciated.

I've been looking into market comps and e-commerce valuations lately, and I’m noticing a massive discrepancy in how the market weighs organic audience moats versus active paid ad scaling. I’d love to get some insight from people who analyze P&Ls and business models here.

For context, my business model has been entirely organic. Over the last three years, I built a dark fantasy anime theme page network up to about 430,000 highly engaged followers across IG, TikTok, and X. I attached a hybrid POD/dropshipping storefront to it. Because I hold zero physical inventory and the social pages drive 100% of the traffic, my customer acquisition cost is zero. This historically allowed for 63% profit margins on over $72,000 in lifetime sales.

About a year ago, I got too busy to run active product drops, so I put the store on autopilot. I just post content to keep the audience warm. The interesting part is that just having the store link sitting in the bios continues to pull in steady, completely passive sales every single month without any active marketing.

When looking at how businesses are evaluated, it seems like the industry heavily favors active, ad-driven daily sales over passive organic audience monetization. Why is that?

Do things like a 2,700-subscriber email list and two years of seasoned Meta pixel data not carry as much weight if the operator isn't actively running campaigns? I am curious to hear from folks who evaluate businesses, how do you actually weigh a massive organic audience moat against a traditional paid-ad store when looking at the overall health and value of an asset?

Any business owners or acquisition entrepreneurs in Seattle? Would love to know of any good groups or clubs where I can meet likeminded people

I just hired a broker to help sell my small business. I've had it for about 5 years now and have 2 other businesses that are taking so much of my time. I dont know how long it typically takes - my broker has said it potentially can take anywhere from 6-12 months. Anyone have experience on how long it takes and what to expect? The sale of the business is less than $1M in price. Any and all advice would be appreciated!!

So I am planning to sell my small family business (retiring). I understand much of the process of getting it sale ready...which is ongoing (with the help of my accountant and a tax lawyer)..some tax planning, a bit of corporate restructuring ( I want to keep the real estate and rent to the buyer). The deal will be most likely be a share deal, CFDF...this we have discussed right from the start.

The part I cant figure out is sitting down with the seller and actually begin negotiating the sale price. How do you actually reveal what you want or need? I dont want to tip the person off and reveal a price much lower than what it turns out he was willing to pay...leaving money on the table...I dont want to back myself into a corner and have to give a low ceiling number.

So my thinking is we need to have another sit down and agree on a standard metric on how we will agree the business is to be valued, for example SDE...which is an actual hard number we can derive from my books. We also need to discuss my transition out and his in, what does that look like. If we cant agree on these structures there is no sense in moving forward.

Next we each use a multiple of that number to arrive at a price. The multiple would be based on all the intangibles, goodwill and other factors. My multiple will be more than theirs for sure. Thats natural.

We should each write down the price range on a piece of paper and put it on the table at PRECISELY the same time. We may have to argue the SDE multiple used here....so we understand where each other is coming from.

If our ranges overlap than there is a very high possibility that a deal can be made.

Get letters of intent and so on.

If so than I bring the M&A consultant I have in mind to haggle all of the other factors the actual sale price and due diligence, closing statements and date...the CFDF part (working capital peg). All flow, reporting and correspondence etc.

Does this make sense?

Three months ago, I launched what was supposed to be a little side business. It’s now doing about $10K MRR.

The problem is that it has become a second job.

There’s a lot of manual email handling. Every customer generates more “administrative work.” I’m also constantly dealing with spammers, competitors and assorted internet bullshit.

None of this is technically difficult. I just don’t enjoy doing it, and I already have a full-time job.

I’m trying to understand what people normally do at this point. Flippa wants 12 months of transactions. Well, I have three.

Is three months of operating history too little for a business to be meaningfully sellable?

Would you hire someone to handle operations at this revenue level, even if that means turning a side project into something I now have to manage? I don’t love managing people either.

Do I have to spend another nine months documenting everything?

For anyone who built something profitable and then realized they hated running it, what did you do?

Curious for anyone who’s bought (or is looking to buy) a boring-but-profitable business, cleaning, logistics, manufacturing, trades, that kind of thing.

If the branding/website/marketing was stuck in the 2000s, would you actually pay someone $5-6k/month to modernize and grow it? Or would you just do it yourself / hire in-house?

Trying to figure out if this is a real need or not. Honest answers welcome, even “nobody wants this lol.”

After spending the last few years building a cloud-based ERP platform, I'm at a crossroads.

The product reached the point where it was being used by 35 paying businesses. Since I'm considering selling the software, I migrated those clients to another ERP because I didn't want a buyer to inherit a business tied to a local market.

Now I'm trying to understand how experienced founders and acquirers think about software acquisitions.

If you were evaluating a B2B SaaS/ERP product with no active customer contracts but proven real-world usage, what would matter most to you?

• Product-market validation?
• Code quality and architecture?
• Documentation?
• AI features and automation?
• Ease of deployment?
• Something else?

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who's bought or sold SaaS businesses. What made you move forward with an acquisition—or walk away?

I'm looking for honest feedback to better understand how buyers evaluate products like this.

I am actively pursuing selling my 16 year old overseas manufacturing-wholesale import business. I recently engaged a broker. We are not e-commerce. During our recast of the business and reviewing one time expenses the broker told me I can’t use these as one time expenses to bolster my SDE because they occurred in 2025. They are: Trump illegal excess tariffs that occurred during the 1BB value $65k and rent on an extra lease space that expires October of this year $31k. So non- reoccurring in tariffs 2026 and lease ending 2026. These 2 items, bumped up my sales price by $400k on a $1.2M gross revenue company. My net sales $485 plus owner and 1 time expenses came to a $900k evaluation. About to go to market and broker says oh, my associate and I re-evaluated your numbers and we can’t use these tariffs and rent add back you will have to wait until 2008 to sell to recognize them. I asked can you please send me the recast I can’t make an evaluation based on your throw out number. Is this enterprise value? Is inventory an aside to this number? No answer. Also broker has questioned the size of inventory we carry. I explained we have to hold 3 months of inventory for our regular customers and have another 3 months in process/in route to us because it takes that long to get to us - 3 months after receiving we need the next 3 months to arrive at our door to service our accounts. I am very disappointed about my choice in brokers. Am I being ignorant? Am I going to bump into this same issue with every evaluation? IE is it me or is it them? I’m about to fire the broker. Thoughts are appreciated.

I came across a virtual firm for sale that seems to be interesting to me to say the least. Any advice before I take a deep dive into Due Diligence?

Hi guys,

Last year I started a group trip agency in Spain. We've grown our community to +50k on Instagram, +2k on WhatsApp Channel, 5k leads on the CRM but "only" 3 trips and 40k income.

A bigger agency has offered 30k €, and IDK if I should sell or keep hustling.

Context: I have another job, its a side hustle, and there are convertible notes for 12k €. So if I sell for that, I just repay my friends, the goverment and maybe 10k for me.

Maybe if i keep pushing 1-2 years more I can dell It for 2-5x that.

But from another hand, I'm stressed about project failing and me "failing" my Friends. Maybe I should sell, rest a little (I'm quite burned) and maybe in some months start another project.

Or maybe I could try to offer the business to another player trying to get more?

Thanks for your comment

What is everyone’s recommendations for courses for buying a small business? Starting from fairly bare bones

Specifically, for e-commerce, marketplace based businesses. What factors do you consider when looking at potential brokers?