How to Protect Your Business When Selling

Selling a business is often a personal choice, and when you have worked toward something for a long time, you don’t want to see all your hard work crushed during the selling process. This means you must protect your business while trying to sell it. But how do you do so?

Below, we’ve gone over a few ways that you can protect your business while still trying to get a good deal. Take a look now to find out more.

Strategies to Protect Your Business When Selling

Whether it's competitors getting a whiff of weakness or untrustworthy outsiders taking advantage, selling your business can be a difficult time. Protecting what’s yours is always important, and below, we’ve rounded up a few of the ways you can do so to ensure a quick and easy sale.

Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs)

You may already use NDAs throughout your business to protect certain information, but they can also come in handy when selling a business.

NDAs are used in business transactions mostly to protect trade secrets. During the selling process, you’re going to be sharing a lot of sensitive data with potential buyers. This will likely include financial records, supplier contracts, and more. All of this is crucial to your business's success and could be dangerous in the hands of a competitor.

For this reason, it’s always a good idea to have any potential buyers sign an NDA when you’re sharing this information to protect your business. Asking them to sign an NDA, also gives you legal recourse if a potential buyer leaks any information disclosed during this period.

No-Name Campaigns

Another good way to keep any competitors at bay is to advertise without the business's name in listings. This means that interested parties reach out to your broker when interested without knowing your business name. 

While this may seem counterintuitive, as long as your listing is attractive to buyers, you’ll still garner interest while protecting your business interests during the selling period.

Vetting Potential Buyers

When you list a business for sale, you’re likely to get lots of interest and a long list of buyers. By vetting and whittling down the list of buyers, you can keep the circle of people who know about the sale much smaller.

If you only share information with a few potential buyers, there’s less chance of sensitive information getting out to the general public and your competitors. Qualifying leads may take a bit of extra work when selling a business, but it can be the difference between a perfect fit and a clumsy sale.

Trusted Business Brokers

Business brokers are experts in their field. They can help you to make your business look attractive, offer advice on industry trends, value your business and take over the whole selling process to make it much less stressful. By working with a business broker that you trust, you can also ensure that your business interests remain protected during the selling process.

They can contact industry connections interested in selling and write a listing that ensures people are interested in your business without disclosing your company name.

Safe and Reliable Selling Platform

Just like the housing market, there are now reliable and safe platforms that you can use to sell a business. They simply require you to list your business for potential buyers to see.

Eden Exchange is one such platform and has a network of thousands of active buyers who will see your listing. On top of this, it offers all of its users a safe and secure place to share sensitive documents and information with potential buyers.

The platform can protect all of your interests and facilitate your transaction, ensuring everything runs smoothly and that none of your business's sensitive information gets out.

Why Do I Need to Protect My Business?

Simply put, protecting your business means you will still have something worth selling at the end of the sales process. If information like your financial records, customer information, and supplier contacts get leaked, there is no way of stopping competitors from using this information.

This could lead to losses in your customer base, changes to suppliers, and even a decline in the assets that come with your business. All of this would make your business much less attractive to potential buyers and could lead to the overall value of your business dropping.

Other Top Tips for Selling Your Business

It can take a long time to sell a business, but there are some things that you can do to ensure it goes smoothly. These are as follows.

• Ensure all of your accounts are up to date so when you give financial records over to a potential buyer, everything is there for them to sift through
• Settle disputes with employees, suppliers, and clients, if there are any
• Put more of your profits back into the business if it’s possible
• Check whether contracts, permits, and licenses may need renewing

These few tips can help you to get your entire business in order and make it as attractive as it can be to a potential buyer. 

Final Thoughts

Selling a business requires the sharing of many important documents and secret information about the inner workings of your business. Protecting this information is in your best interests, and fortunately, there are many ways you can do so.

If you want a safe and secure platform to sell your business, look no further than Eden Exchange. We have already facilitated thousands of sales and offer a space for each of our clients to securely share information with potential buyers.

Get in touch now to find out more about selling your business with us.