How to Compare Potential Buyers When Selling Your Business
Selling your business can feel overwhelming. Even with a solid and detailed plan in place, there may be confusion and friction in the succession of your manufacturing business from family ownership to an outside buyer. According to the Exit Planning Institute, 76% of business owners who sold their businesses profoundly regretted selling within a year. This figure shows what’s at stake for small to mid-sized industrial manufacturers.
Seller’s remorse comes in many forms, but it doesn’t always mean selling was the wrong move. It can also come from a feeling that although it was the right time (and even the right price) for a sale, the buyer somehow isn’t doing right by the legacy you’ve built over many years and perhaps the sale has, in a way, let your employees and customers down.
Such a delicate process deserves the utmost care and expertise. To select the right partner for the sale, take the time to assemble a list and ask meaningful questions about mission alignment, trust, and overall benefit.
How to Sell Your Business to a Financial Buyer and Avoid Seller’s Remorse
Private equity investors and search funds can often make for impersonal business buyers that have their own priorities in the purchase — which may not align with your goals and your legacy. While you’re reviewing a purchase offer, make sure to address your valid concerns by looking at the prospective buyer of a company and seeing where they fit with regard to the following traits:
Right Fit Financial Buyers |
Poor Fit Financial Buyers |
| Give careful regard to the communities impacted by the sale (customers, employees, supply chains, local community). | Prioritize maximum profit for large institutional investors without regard for impact on communities. |
| Intend to support the business and focus on preserving and nurturing its growth organically without upheaval. | Show signs of trying to “flip” the business — a strategy focused on taking out costs, then selling as soon as a higher price is offered by a new buyer. |
| Preserve the legacy and brand of family-owned businesses, expanding opportunities for your business and employees. | Will often systematically eliminate legacy while integrating the company into a larger platform. |
| Provides a future for your manufacturing company and employees that emphasizes opportunities for growth and promotion. | Move for immediate exit of the management team with limited focus on providing future upside to your employees. |
| Experience buying businesses like yours and continuing to support their unique needs as well as the needs of their existing customers post-acquisition. | Have not completed the acquisition of a business like yours, or acquire businesses across industries without specific experience to support a business like yours. |
Selling Your Business the Right Way — Choose a Partner That Cares What Happens Next
It’s not easy to sell the business you’ve built. At ReNEW Manufacturing Solutions, our mission is to provide the future your company deserves. We’re building a new and innovative future for family-owned manufacturing businesses while preserving tradition, serving communities, and taking care of employees.
Why choose ReNEW? It’s simple.
Our team members have been there. We’ve applied our years of operational know-how and lived experience in your shoes to create a proven track record of scaling and growing businesses for the long term. Now we’re a local network of families and individual investors that believe local businesses are vital to the success of the American Economy.
It’s our mission to help you to preserve your family’s legacy. Provide your business and employees with the future they deserve. From the start, we invest in and guide your business to ensure your hard-earned reputation for quality work, quick turnarounds, and great prices continue to define your brand in years to come. Your business deserves a buyer who invests in the employees that have made you successful thus far.
We work together to challenge the status quo. This is not your average private equity or search fund. You’re not simply getting acquired through a hands-off financial transaction, but joining a family of enduring, like-minded businesses that remain committed to local community relationships and building on their success from this generation to the next.
You’ll enjoy flexible terms and deal structures, which is a critical advantage that helps your business realize both immediate gains and future upside.
Ensure your manufacturing business’s continuity with our tailored approach to growth and success. Our team can help you to determine the next steps that will be a win for you, your employees, your customers, and your community.
Partner with us today and help your family-owned company keep its values and thrive into the future.