Everything owners ask us, answered.

First, you are and always will be a priority. We say this as we routinely see owners select a firm, attorney, or wealth advisor when we know they are low priority for the advisor. We had a seller use a well-known law firm downtown..the attorney was working on a $70M transaction at the same time as our $3.5M deal. The attorney took two weeks to reply to emails and frustrated everyone, including his client.

There are M&A and business broker firms in the Pacific Northwest with 5, 10, and even 20 headshots on their site. The vast majority of these folks are "industry advisors" or never complete a sale. If you are interviewing brokers - ask to speak with a seller they helped in the last year.

Four of the owners / sales we completed in the last 18 months each burned a year with other local firms first, got frustrated, and came to us. You are looking for the right advisor, with the right capabilities – not the largest firm.

Second, we encourage you to compare the quality of marketing materials we produce, and how we write about businesses online, vs other firms. Check out our activity on LinkedIn and any business for sale platform. The professional marketing pieces are going to be the first time a buyer learns that it is “your business” – we get positive buyer feedback continuously on the quality of content and materials, including from far larger investment banks. This investment in polished marketing directly benefits you in attracting more buyers and ultimately driving a higher transaction price.

Third, take a look at our industry awards for verified transactions. Check out the associations online: M&A Source and the IBBA (International Business Brokers Association). Washington Business Brokers, and Ryan Hemmert, is the ONLY firm in Washington and Oregon to be recognized four years in a row for verified deal activity.

You can verify the industry awards and reviews online.

We will gladly share references of happy sellers for you to speak with.

The quickest sale we have had, from the date we e-signed an engagement agreement to the closing date, was four months.

The longest sale took a full 12 months. A reasonable expectation is six to eight months. Transaction length varies based on the financial profile of the business, industry, location, and macro environment.

When we partner with an owner on a sale, it is important that the owner stays focused on driving business results with their team and clients / customers, precisely because the sale process takes time. Our commitment to sellers is to drive the sale process as hard as we can while you focus on driving the business.

For a more granular view of "time to sell" check out the Market Reports page (see Resources).

We work on a straight success fee (commission) basis. We get paid only at closing when funds are wired from an escrow or legal firm.

As you would expect, the % success fee decreases as the transaction size increases. We follow a standard fee structure up to $5M in transaction size. If we value your business greater than $5M, we will custom quote a success fee.

In addition, every seller can put up to three "named buyers" directly in our engagement agreement. In the event "the buyer" is one of these three, you receive a 20% discount on the standard fee structure.

In our experience working with many different firms, you are not likely to see a great deal of variation in fee. You are looking for the sharpest advisor and the best fit.

We believe strongly in getting things done, fair deals, and building our reputation one fair deal at at time.

Confidentiality is foundational to what we do. Our mornings start with a review of every buyer NDA that came in overnight on the businesses we currently represent. We are meticulous in reviewing these, in fact, we even have a negative online review from a prospective buyer who thought our screening process was too rigorous!

Take a careful look at the "Businesses for Sale" page - you will see no company or owner names listed. Instead, we say something along these lines..

Washington Business Brokers represents a $4.5M sales, $1.1M cash flow roofing business in metro Seattle.

30+ years in business, 4 crews with 3 - 5 roofers each, 2 estimators, and 2 office staff, seller preparing for retirement. For more information about the opportunity, go to wabusinessbrokers.com and submit an NDA. After your NDA has been reviewed and verified, we will release more confidential information about the opportunity.

We follow this process, to a T, with every busines and every buyer inquiry.

Rest assured, our processes are built around maintaining confidentiality and successfully selling your business.

No. We flex across industries and have experience with many business types, operating models, sizes, and locations.

Think of us like you would a good attorney or CPA. We are process experts and work with owners through a very specific, sequenced series of transaction steps to close a fair deal.

Our expertise is in valuation, optimizing a business for sale, creating compelling, confidential marketing materials, buyer identification and qualification, negotiation, deal structuring, and closing.

The wide range of industries we facilitate deals in benefits you – we simply see more deal types and interact with more types of buyers and financial groups, than an advisor or firm super deep in one niche.

Across hundreds of business valuations and completed sales, the odds are high that we have sold a business like yours.

In some cases, though, we may not have. There are many niche business verticals that continue to surprise us, learning about so many unique businesses is one of the fascinating parts of what we do. Partly because of the large mix of business owners we work with, we see similarities in deal types across industries that may not be obvious at first glance to an owner.

Think of us like you would a good attorney or CPA. We are process experts and work with owners through a very specific, sequenced series of transaction steps to close a fair deal.

No one is ever really ready. However, every business owner will eventually want to sell. A seller has two choices: sell, or hold and grow. There is an old expression that applies to the timing: business owners seldom sell too soon, but they often wait too long.

Yes. We have experience selling many different types of commercial real estate as part of a business sale, including warehouses, lots for service vehicles, professional practice office suites, car washes, and more.

Yes. When a business owner also owns the commerical real estate a business operates from, we will explore various paths with the owner, including a FMV sale or lease of the owned commercial RE.

Yes. Selling company stock requires specific federal and state licenses, without which any offering made by a broker is illegal. We sell the entire entity as an asset sale, or, if the buyer and seller negotiate to complete the transaction as a stock sale, we will register with the Washington Secretary of State to participate in the transaction.

Yes, your business will be marketed across many business for sale platforms that we use, including BizBuySell. There are 5 other core platforms that we use for nearly every business we bring to market. Beyond this, we use our buyer email list, social media, and video to spotlight businesses we represent.

The reality is that finding a buyer is one of the easiest parts of the sale process.

The heavy lifting, expertise and value we bring to an owner is in valuation, confidential marketing, negotiations, due diligence, addressing lender and investor considerations, navigating a Quality of Earnings (QoE) analyis and cash proof, facilitating legal documents, and closing.

Yes, in nearly all business sales a seller will engage an attorney. If an owner has a trusted attorney that they have worked with before, great. If an owner needs attorney recommendations, we are glad to provide the names of trusted, local attorneys who have helped numerous sellers and buyers.

In a business sale, a buyer will also have an attorney. For a buyer, their two primary advisors are their attorney and lender.

We will guide you on when in the sale process to get an attorney and share best practices on how to best work with your attorney to keep the deal process moving and minimize your transaction expenses.

From our experience, legal fees in a transaction typically range from 0.5 - 1.5% of a deal.

The valuation report calculates the weighted cash flow over the last three to five years, incorporating various factors to determine a suitable multiplier, and arrives at a fair market value. It offers an independent opinion to help you present the business for sale. It determines the price at which the business would transfer from a willing and knowledgeable buyer to a willing and knowledgeable seller.

A valuation may not be useful if your business is less than two years old or lacks a well-maintained bookkeeping system. But if you are committed to robust bookkeeping and focused on improving the business, a valuation report becomes exceptionally valuable. You receive a price range you can anticipate in the marketplace, which boosts a buyer's confidence and streamlines due diligence.

Every business has its own issues, and the best way to bring them to the surface is a deep analysis. Some are minor and can be corrected immediately; others can be worked on over time; a few are not fixable but a credible explanation can be given. The goal is to surface the good, the bad and the ugly so all material facts are disclosed. Most deals fall apart during due diligence. As a seller, you would rather the buyer had full information before the purchase agreement than have to explain it afterwards.

Yes, as long as the valuation report is up to date and credible.

Some operators use unsolicited telephone marketing or seminar invitations to reach business owners, then apply pressure to persuade them the business is worth a great deal, in order to justify a large upfront fee. In those cases the inflated valuation is a pretext for the charge, and there is often no real intention of selling the business. We charge no upfront fee, so we have no incentive to quote you a number we cannot deliver.