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The objections answered straight, and why the market has a long memory
“I'll just sell it myself and save the commission.” Fair enough. If your business is small and simple and you already have a buyer, that can be the right call. Here is every objection answered straight.
Nothing on this page is a sales pitch and nothing here is charged for. Last updated 15 September 2026.
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The market has a long memory
This is the part almost every owner underestimates. A business is not a car you can relist next week. When you take it to market, the market remembers. If you hawk it around yourself, let the wrong people see the numbers, and it sits there unsold for a year, you have not just wasted time. You have damaged the asset, maybe permanently.
Word gets out that the business is for sale and cannot find a buyer. Competitors smell blood. Your best staff quietly update their resumes. Customers wonder if you are still going to be around. Suppliers get nervous. And the buyers who do circle back later assume something is wrong with it, because if it was any good, why is it still on the market? A business that has been shopped around and gone stale carries a stink that a fresh, properly run listing never does. You can drop the price and it still will not shift, because the story has already been written.
That is the true cost of getting it wrong. Not the fee you saved. The value you destroyed on the one asset you cannot afford to get wrong, with no undo button. A professional runs it clean and confidential the first time, so the business never gets tainted in the first place. That alone is worth more than any commission.
You would not ask a truck driver to bake your wedding cake, or a baker to pull your tooth. Not because they are not clever, but because it is not their craft, and the stakes of getting it wrong are too high to have a go yourself.
Selling the business you have spent twenty years building is exactly that kind of moment. There is a great deal of money attached to it, it is legally and commercially complex, and you get one attempt at it. That is not the moment to have a crack and learn on the job. That is the moment to hand it to someone who does only this, all day, every day.
A broker is the professional who sits in the middle of the whole thing and makes every other party work together. They speak the accountant's language on the numbers and the add backs. They work with the solicitors on both sides to keep the contract moving. They manage the buyer, the buyer's advisers, the finance, the due diligence and the settlement, all at once, so nothing falls through a crack. Acting for everyone at the table where it keeps the deal alive, and firmly for the seller where it counts, on the price and the terms. That orchestration is a craft in itself, and it is not one you want to be learning with your own business on the line.
The objections answered straight, and why the market has a long memory
“I'll just sell it myself and save the commission.”
Fair enough, and if your business is small, simple and you already have a buyer lined up, sometimes that's the right call. But for many owners, selling alone means personally doing five jobs at once: finding buyers, protecting confidentiality, qualifying the time wasters, negotiating with no competing offers to lean on, and holding the deal together through due diligence. Any one of those going wrong costs more than the fee.
The commission is visible. The money left on the table selling alone is invisible, which is exactly why it's the one that hurts.
“Everyone will find out I'm selling.”
This is the big one, and it's a real risk, just not the way many owners think. The leak usually happens when you sell alone, because the moment you start ringing around approaching buyers yourself, you're showing your hand to competitors, suppliers, customers and eventually staff. Word travels fast in every industry.
The worst version of this is listing a business publicly, on Facebook Marketplace, in a local group, or anywhere open. The moment "profitable transport business for sale" appears in public, your staff see it, your customers see it, and your competitors screenshot it and go fishing for your clients. There is no vetting, no agreement, and no way to unsay it. Never sell a real business that way.
A proper broker process is the opposite by design. The business is marketed blind, described by its shape and numbers with no name and no address, so nobody can tell whose business it is. Every buyer signs a confidentiality agreement and is qualified for genuine intent and financial capacity before they receive anything identifying, which filters out the competitors and tyre kickers fishing for information. And the truly sensitive detail, your client names, your contracts, your crown jewels, is staged, released only late in the process to a committed, vetted buyer, often after an offer is already on the table. Your client list is one of the last things revealed, not the first.
Public listings hand everything to everyone. A run process releases information in stages, only to vetted buyers who have signed for it.
“Brokers work for the buyer, not the seller.”
You hear this a lot, and it's worth killing clearly, because it confuses two different things. When you engage a broker to sell your business, that broker works for you. The engagement is yours, the fee is paid by you, and the legal and commercial duty is to you, the seller. The aim is to work towards the strongest price and terms the market will support, by creating competition between qualified buyers.
What people are half remembering is a buyer's agent, someone a buyer separately hires to act on their side. That's a different role entirely. Your selling broker sits firmly in your corner, and the way they get paid, on the result, means their interest and yours point the same direction: the strongest result the market will support.
Engaged by the seller, paid by the seller, working for the seller. Full stop.
“I don't need a broker to find a buyer.”
Maybe you know one or two. But the buyer who pays the most is rarely the obvious local one, it's the interstate group expanding, the competitor who needs your capacity, the investor backing an operator, the overseas buyer entering the market. You can't reach those people from your desk, and they won't find you.
This is where a broker does what no owner can do alone. Finding those buyers is active work: building a target list, approaching trade buyers and investors directly and discreetly, working the buyers already registered with me, and running the confidential campaign that brings the rest out of the woodwork. That is the difference between one negotiation and genuine competition, and competition is what lifts the price.
One buyer is a negotiation. Many buyers is an auction, and auctions favour the seller.
“I already know what it's worth.”
Knowing your number is a great start, and if you've read the guide on what your business is worth, you're ahead of the field. But knowing the price isn't the same as achieving it. The value on paper only becomes money in your account through a process that creates competition, defends your figure against a buyer's accountant, and gets the deal across the line without collapsing.
The number is the target. The process is how you actually hit it.
Who may legally sell a business in Queensland
| Who | What they may do | What the Property Occupations Act 2014 (Qld) says |
|---|---|---|
| You, selling your own business | Everything. Appraise it, market it, approach buyers, negotiate the price, sign the contract and settle. No licence, no appointment form, no trust account. | Section 97(1) applies to a person acting “as an agent for someone else for reward”. You are not an agent for someone else, so a private sale sits outside the Act. It also sits outside the trust account rules and the claim fund. |
| A licensed agent Queensland Office of Fair Trading licence | Section 26 authorises the holder, as an agent for others for reward, to “buy, sell, exchange, or let businesses or interests in businesses” and to negotiate for those things. | Must hold a current licence, must be appointed in writing on the PO Form 6A before acting (section 102, maximum 200 penalty units), and must bank client money to a trust account by the next business day under the Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 (Qld) section 16. |
| Your accountant | Prepare and normalise the financials, produce the add back schedule, advise on tax if registered with the Tax Practitioners Board, and sit beside you through the negotiation. | Section 97(4) contains the exemptions and there is no accountant among them. Building a buyer list, running the campaign, negotiating the price and taking a fee contingent on the sale is section 26 work. Maximum penalty under section 97 is 200 penalty units or 2 years imprisonment, $34,540 at $172.70 from 1 July 2026. |
| Your solicitor | Draft and advise on the contract, the special conditions, the restraint, the lease assignment and the deeds, and act on settlement. That is legal practice and it is their work, not a broker’s. | The Legal Profession Act 2007 (Qld) authorises legal practice. It does not authorise acting as a property agent for reward. On the face of section 97 a solicitor who appraises the business, markets it, finds the buyer and takes a percentage of the price is performing section 26 activities. |
| An unlicensed introducer, finder or “corporate adviser” | Nothing, for reward. An unpaid introduction is a different thing, and the boundary narrows the moment a success fee, a referral fee or a share of proceeds appears. | Section 97(3)(b) and (c) make it an offence to advertise, notify, state or in any way hold out as ready to perform the activity, before a single introduction is made. A website is enough. Section 89 then bars recovery of the fee, and keeping it is a separate offence at 200 penalty units. |
Property Occupations Act 2014 (Qld) sections 26, 89, 97 and 102, and Agents Financial Administration Act 2014 (Qld) section 16, read at legislation.qld.gov.au in August 2026. Penalty unit value $172.70 from 1 July 2026 under the Penalties and Sentences Act 1992 (Qld) section 5A. This table describes the law in general terms. It is not advice on your own arrangement with your own adviser.
Ask what it is worth
Free, in writing, and nobody finds out you asked. Tell me the trade and the suburb and I will do the rest.
Nobody finds out you are selling. This goes to me only, into my own database in Sydney. I will not contact your accountant, your landlord, your bank or your staff, ever, unless you ask me to.
If you would rather not put anything in writing yet, ring 0431 124 128. Prefer to pick a time yourself? Book a time in my diary.
Find out where you actually stand
Before you decide to do it alone, have the conversation that tells you what the alternative actually looks like. Thirty minutes, no cost, no obligation, and nothing said in it goes anywhere.