Questions owners ask before they pick up the phone

Every sector. Nine of them have a published seller guide written from operating background: earthmoving and civil, transport and logistics, construction and building, mining services, e-commerce and retail, window furnishings and custom interiors, toy and gift retail, turf farms, and workplace health and safety consultancy and training.

The nine are not a limit on what can be sold. They are the industries where a buyer can be spoken to in their own language from the first meeting, which shortens the qualifying stage and keeps a seller out of meetings that were never going to lead anywhere.

Not strictly, but it changes two things that cost money. The first is how quickly a buyer is qualified, because someone who knows the sector can tell a serious enquiry from a tyre kicker in one conversation.

The second is how your value is argued. A plant register, a work in progress schedule, a remake rate or a water allocation each needs to be explained to a buyer’s accountant in terms they will accept. A broker who has never seen one will hand that argument to the buyer by default.

Nothing changes about the process. The appraisal, the buyer research, the confidentiality, the information memorandum, the negotiation and the management of due diligence are the same in every industry.

What changes is that more questions get asked before a number is put on it. That is a better answer than claiming expertise that does not exist, and it is the honest one.

Usually not by itself, and this is the question that decides deal structure in several of these sectors. A QBCC contractor licence attaches to the legal entity and the Queensland Building and Construction Commission Act 1991 contains no transfer provision. RTO registration cannot move between legal entities at all.

Where the licence or registration is the business, a share sale keeps it and an asset sale destroys it. That has to be settled before a price is agreed, not during due diligence. Each sector guide sets out the position for that sector with the regulator named.

That is a question for your accountant and your solicitor, and the answer changes what you keep by more than the negotiation usually does.

What a broker contributes is the commercial half of it: which structure preserves the licence, the accreditation, the contracts or the lease that the buyer is actually paying for. Shares in a private company are a financial product under the Corporations Act. Tony Pope holds no Australian Financial Services Licence and gives no financial product advice.

Six to nine months from appraisal to settlement is a reasonable planning range for a prepared business. Three to six of those months are the campaign, the contract and settlement.

It runs longer where a landlord has to consent to a lease assignment, where a licence or accreditation has to be obtained by the buyer, or where the records have to be rebuilt before a buyer can verify them. The twelve to twenty four months before you go to market is where the price is actually made.

A licence issued by the Queensland Office of Fair Trading under the Property Occupations Act 2014. Queensland issues no separate business broker licence, so broking is carried out under that licence, which covers the sale of businesses as well as land.

The licence is publicly searchable. Tony Pope holds licence 4963575. The practical consequence is worth knowing: anyone holding a general agent licence can call themselves a business broker tomorrow, whether or not they have ever sold a business.

Not through a properly run process. The business goes to market described by its shape and its numbers, with no trading name and no address attached.

Every enquiry signs a confidentiality agreement and is qualified before anything identifying is released, and the detail that would let a competitor work out who you are comes last, to a buyer who is already committed. In a connected industry, confidentiality is not a courtesy. It is the process.

The fee structure is published in full on the fees page rather than discussed at a meeting. There is no charge for the appraisal, no charge before you engage, and no charge afterwards if the business does not sell.

The comparison that matters is not the fee against zero. It is the fee against what a campaign run badly costs you, which is usually a worse price, a withdrawn listing that follows the business, and no second attempt for a year or two.

Earlier than feels necessary. The moves that lift a price the most, reducing owner dependence, spreading customer concentration, getting licences held by more than one person, and putting handshake arrangements on paper, all take twelve to twenty four months to show up in the numbers.

A conversation two years out costs nothing and turns waiting into planning. A conversation two weeks out only tells you what you are about to be marked down for.

It is free, there is no charge afterwards, and there is no obligation to list. The catch, if it is one, is that a real appraisal takes your actual figures rather than a rule of thumb, so it takes about thirty minutes of your time and access to your last few years of accounts.

Nothing said in that conversation goes anywhere. There is no follow up you did not ask for.

No. I sell businesses in every sector. The nine listed are the industries where I have run, worked in or spent years alongside the trade, so I already understand how they make money and what a buyer will scrutinise. For everything else the process, the buyer research and the discipline are identical, and I do the work to understand your business properly before it goes anywhere near a buyer.

It matters less than you might assume, provided the broker is honest about it and does the preparation. The fundamentals that determine value are the same in every business ever sold: normalised earnings, owner dependence, customer concentration, recurring revenue, transferable systems and clean records. What changes between industries is which of those matters most and what the specific questions look like. That is learnable. What is not acceptable is a broker learning your industry at your expense during due diligence.

Hospitality, health and allied health, professional services, manufacturing, automotive, childcare, agriculture, franchising, wholesale, fitness, personal services and technology, among others. Size matters more than sector. If the business has clean financials, a defensible position and earnings that support a price a buyer will pay, it is saleable.

Book a free confidential appraisal and find out. It costs nothing, carries no obligation and nobody finds out you asked. You are probably twelve months to three years from selling, which is the single most useful time to ask because there is still time to change the answer. If the honest assessment is that the business is not saleable in its current state, I will tell you that too.