Why You Cannot Find Your Own Buyer

You know your industry better than anyone. You can name every competitor, most of their customers, and which of them is struggling. So finding a buyer should be the easy part.

It is the part that fails most reliably, and for reasons that have nothing to do with how well you know your market.

The call you cannot make

Start with the obvious move: the strategic acquirer, the large company that should obviously want you.

You find the main number. You reach a switchboard. You explain that you would like to speak to someone about a possible acquisition, and you are transferred to an assistant whose job, explicitly and competently, is to decide which messages reach the person you want. You cannot say what the call is about, because saying what it is about is the one thing you cannot do on an unsecured call to a company you have not signed anything with.

So you leave a vague message from a name nobody recognizes. You will be lucky if it is written down.

This is not a persistence problem. The gatekeeping works, and it works against exactly the kind of approach you are able to make. The people who get through are the ones calling from a firm that corporate development teams already take calls from, about a specific company that fits a specific strategy, with a document ready to send the moment an NDA is signed.

The buyers you can reach are the wrong ones

Meanwhile the buyers who are easy to reach are easy to reach for a reason.

Smaller companies and individuals will take your call immediately. Some of them are genuinely interested. Very few of them have the capital, and that produces a specific question you should decide on before, not during: are you prepared to finance this yourself?

Because that is what it means. A buyer without resources is asking you to carry a note, which means you have not sold your company. You have swapped an asset you control for a receivable secured by a business someone else is now running. Sometimes that is the right deal. It should be a decision, not a thing you discover in month four.

And going wide does not work either

The correction most owners reach for is volume. If reaching one buyer is hard, reach everybody.

Two problems. The first is that you cannot. There is no list, and the companies worth approaching are not the companies that answer advertisements.

The second is that you would not want to if you could. Every prospect is a confidentiality agreement to negotiate, a conversation to have, a set of documents to send, a tour to host, and a set of questions to answer about your business. A hundred of those is not a hundred chances. It is a hundred ways to spend the year not running your company, while information about you circulates among people who were never going to buy.

The right mindset is that almost any business could be the buyer. The right action is a small number of the right ones.

The buyer is often outside your industry

Here is the part that surprises owners most, and it is the strongest argument against doing this yourself.

You will build your list from the companies you know, which means your competitors and the firms adjacent to you. That list is not wrong, and it is rarely where the best price comes from.

The buyer who pays a premium is usually the one with a specific reason: they need your geography, your production capacity, your customer list to run their product through, a capability they have been trying to build for two years and failing. Those reasons live in their strategy, not in your industry, and you have no way of knowing them from outside.

Finding that buyer is research: working out who has a reason to want this specific company, then reaching the person inside it who can act. It is a different activity from knowing your market, and the whole value sits in the gap between the two.

What this costs when it goes wrong

The company that does not get found does not get a low offer. It gets no offer, and the owner concludes the market is soft.

More often there is one buyer — the one who called, or the competitor who was easy to reach — and everything that follows is a negotiation with no alternative. The price is set by who happened to find you, which is not the same as who values you most.

That is the real cost of running your own search. Not the hours. The buyer you never met.

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This is what we do. Prism Edge builds the buyer universe, researching who has a specific reason to want your company, inside your industry and well outside it, then reaching the people who can act. Confidentially, and in parallel, so there is more than one number.

And the full chapter on this is in Selling Your Business The Easy Way, free to download here.