Fix It Before You Sell It: Why Most Owners Wait Too Long

Name: Business Broker Growth
Address: US
Telephone: +1-206-234-1848
Price range: $$

How do you get your ideal client to realize they want your help before they think they want your help?

That is the eternal challenge of the business broker.

If someone has a car that starts having mechanical problems, the best time to try and sell it and get a new one would have been way before those problems started.

Otherwise, the outcome will be

they won’t get as much money for it with the problems it has, or
they must spend money to fix the issues so it can be worth selling.

Most people don’t want to throw good money after bad.

If someone has a house that is having issues, the best time to try and sell it would have been way before issues occurred. Once they happen, you are now stuck in the same scenario as above – put money into fixing those issues so you can get market price for the house or sell it ‘as-is’ and understand that people will offer less than you had hoped to get.

(And…there is a chance that the issues are so bad that a conventional buyer can’t get financing, which means you can only sell to all-cash buyers…which will potentially result in a fire sale scenario).

Then there are businesses where this happens all the time.

They engage a business broker at the point where they are tired of running the business. They are burnt out. Or there has been an illness/death. They are getting a divorce. Some key leaders/employees have left. A major client stopped doing business with them.

Yet they think that their proverbial house-with-the-huge-plumbing-issue should still fetch some type of market rate top dollar, like the guy they spoke with who sold his business a few years ago.

This is why it is so important for you to be present in the online space. You must have a trail of digital breadcrumbs that leads business owners to you.

Then you must be proactive with some type of outreach that triggers people to start picking up those digital breadcrumbs.

You need them to move from not knowing what they don’t know, to knowing that they don’t know something.

That is the point where you can help them. You can educate them on the process and what it means to take a high-quality product (their business) to market.

If you want to sell a car for top dollar, you might need weeks or a few months to get it there.

If you want to sell a house for top dollar, it could take a year or more to do the fixing and remodeling needed.

If you want a business to sell for top dollar, plan on three to five years of strategic efforts.

Your mission, as a business broker, is to get to business owners long before they realize they need to sell.

Featured Podcast Episode

Listen in as Jason Cutter sits down with Daniel Brainard, Owner of Next Step Capital, to discuss the evolution from youthful entrepreneurship to thriving as a business broker—especially in the niche world of FedEx logistics contracts.

TOP 3 TAKEAWAYS

1. The Power of Real-World Experience Daniel Brainard didn’t just leap into business brokering—his journey included running a lawn care company as a teen, real estate deals, multifamily investments, and growing a FedEx logistics business to over 130 employees with $12M+ in revenue. Each chapter offered new lessons in managing people, embracing risk, and the realities of operating a business.

2. Transparent, Relationship-Driven Brokerage Wins Whether it’s helping a new buyer understand FedEx’s unique contract world (06:45), or talking a seller through pricing expectations, Daniel Brainard and Jason Cutter champion playing the long game:

Honesty over hype
Building genuine rapport
Putting people over transactions
And yes: “Give it a tax return!” before splurging on that new truck

3. Failures Teach More Than Easy Wins The after-show gets real when Daniel Brainard candidly shares the hard lessons from a major deal that collapsed due to trust and communication breakdowns. What did he learn? Get things in writing, keep communication clear, and never underestimate how quickly buyer trust can vanish.

QUOTE OF THE EPISODE

“I want to be able to go to sleep and sleep well… If there’s something going on [in the business], it’s gonna come out. Play with integrity.” — Daniel Brainard