How To Pre-Qualify A Potential Buyer

Tire kickers, not serious, non-responsive, trust issues, no funds; these are some of the things that we have heard from business owners who have tried to sell their business on their own.  How do you know who is a ready willing and able buyer, for you to engage in discussions with.  In this video I will explain how.

Hello, my name is Sundeep Gill and I’m the founder of GillAgency – a leading M&A boutique advisory firm.

Taking your business to marketplace is a daunting task, you would have to have a valuation in mind, how you got to that valuation, blind summary of the business, a Confidential Information Memorandum, an NDA and clear plan on how to navigate this path.After you have done all that and taken the business to the marketplace, you will get inquiries from buyers who are looking for more information.

So how do you know who’s real and who’s not.  Here at GillAgency we conduct couple of checks to ensure that the information that is being sent out is being sent out to a legitimate buyer.  The way we do this is by requesting every buyer to sign our NDA which will include a section for their LinkedIn profile and a buyer questionnaire.  We then go ahead and do a check on their LinkedIn profile to see if they are in the similar or related industry, evaluate if they have companies that they have owned, go to their company websites to see if they appear on their website.

Yes, a lot of times the LinkedIn profiles are not updated and that is why we have a buyer questionnaire which we look and research to ensure that the buyer is genuine.  There are times when there is no LinkedIn profile associated with the buyer; let’s face it not everyone is on LinkedIn.  In that case we ask for the buyer to provide references online that we can independently check. Only after these thorough checks do we send out the Confidential Information Memorandum to the buyer.  Without these checks you will either be sending out confidential information to buyers that have no businesses in receiving and wasting your time.

So now that we have accomplished checking the buyer background and sending out the confidential information memorandum, the next very important step is following up with them on a weekly basis.  We can’t stress enough how important this step is in bringing a successful close to a business.

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