4 Reasons to Sell your Business with Wired Investors
If you’re an owner of an online business and you’re thinking about selling your business, there are a number of options you might consider.
You could reach out to your network and see if anybody’s interested in buying – doing this might mean you’d get a lower valuation (as less potential buyers see your business is for sale), but you might save on things like deal fees and brokerage.
You could list your business on an auction-style marketplace like Flippa. If your goal is to attract as many eyeballs as possible to the business you’re looking to sell, Flippa is probably the place you’d want to go. On the other hand, more serious buyers sometimes view Flippa as a lower-end marketplace for smaller and less well-developed businesses, so if you do go with Flippa, you might attract a lot of eyeballs, but they might not be the right eyeballs.
You could also go with an online business broker. Brokers like Empire Flippers, FE International and Quiet Light Brokerage all have good reputations as solid business brokers. Which of these brokers you might choose will depend on the size of your business – Empire Flippers tends to deal with smaller businesses, FE international is typically mid-range, and Quiet Light and a couple of other brokers like Digital Exits tend to deal with larger businesses.
However, before you make the decision to choose one of these other options, you might also want to consider selling your business with us, here at Wired Investors.
Our business model has some pretty significant advantages over all the other options listed here. Here are just a few of the many reasons why an online business owner might want to choose Wired Investors over his/her other options.
1. We Encourage Seller Retention
Other online business brokers will advise against existing owners retaining an equity share of their business. Can you blame them? Brokers get paid a commission based on the sold portion of the business – if you, as a business owner, retain 20%, that also lowers your broker’s commission by 20%.
Here at Wired, we actually encourage sellers to retain a portion of their business. Typically, sellers who come through us have chosen to retain about 20%.
We do this for a number of reasons. First and foremost, we recognize that business owners tend to be a fount of knowledge when it comes to their specific industry and business. By allowing sellers to retain a %, it gives us the ability to keep an open communication channel with them – even if its just an email a month asking for advice or guidance on some specific issue. We’ve found that having access to the previous owners of the business has proved invaluable to us.
We also realize that business owners want to share in the ongoing success of the businesses that they’ve built – even if they’re no longer managing the day to day operations, they want to have a stake in the future of a business they built from the ground up.
There’s obviously also a sentimental aspect to all of this – if you’ve built something yourself, even if you sell it, you’re still interested in seeing how it turns out. By encouraging seller retention, we allow sellers to observe how the business is performing, even if they no longer want to be involved at all in the operations.
2. Our Management Team Takes Over
If you’re selling your business through a broker, there’s no real guarantee that the person who ends up buying your business will know what he/she is doing. There are certainly buyers out there who are experienced owners and operators of online businesses, but there are also probably a good amount of buyers who are in the online business space just looking for what they see as easy investment returns with no effort.
You’ve got the experience to know that managing an online business often isn’t as easy as its made out to be. Sure, when you’re at the point where you’re ready to sell your business, you may have managed to reduce your hours to 5 or 10 hours a week, but that’s only because you already know how everything works. Someone with no online business experience would almost definitely have a more difficult time.
If you sell your business with Wired however, this isn’t something you need to worry about it. Our experienced team of managers and operators have decades of combined experience, covering every area of the online business space you could imagine. As a group, we’ve pretty much seen it all – everything from old school adsense niche sites to silicon valley tech startups. We’re also constantly looking for new, high caliber people to partner with.
If you feel any kind of ownership of your business, you almost certainly don’t want to see it stagnate and eventually fade into obscurity. By selling your business through Wired, you won’t have to worry about it – in fact, you’ll get an opportunity to see the business flourish and reach new heights.
3. You can be Involved (or not) as you Want
As we’ve already stated, we acknowledge that the person who built a business that we’re interested in working on typically has a great reservoir of knowledge about both the industry and the business itself. We don’t take this lightly. We also recognize that sometimes people are ready to move on to new projects and don’t want to be involved at all in the day to day operations of a business that they’re looking to sell.
As such, we’re pretty flexible about allowing sellers to be as involved as they want in the ongoing operations of the business. If for example, you own a SAAS business, and your interest is primarily on the marketing side, we’re more than happy to work in tandem with you on the marketing side and taking over completely on the product development side. Some sellers might prefer to be not involved at all – and we’re in these cases we’re also happy to take over the operations of the business completely.
If you sell with a standard online business broker and you sell 100% of your business, you can bet that over time, your involvement with the business in question will go to zero. By selling with Wired, you can keep your options open.
As an example of this in action, we recently acquired a business that provides a productized service – one of the previous owners of the business offered to put together a plan for entry into the Spanish language market for this business. While this plan is still being discussed, that’s the kind of ongoing owner involvement that would probably be impossible if you sold your business through a more traditional business broker.
4.We Can Move Quickly
Unlike traditional brokers, we aren’t reliant on buyer interest. The way that Wired Investors works is we have a network of high net worth investors who are willing to invest in the businesses that come across our desk, and the ultimate decision to buy or not to buy is made by the Wired team itself. That means that you don’t have to wait for bids from an outside source – we can let you know whether or not a business is interesting to us pretty quickly.
This also means that you only have to get on calls with one group of people – us – and you won’t have to talk multiple buyers through the same basic financial and operational details over and over again. It also means that there’s no chance of your listing languishing on a broker’s website, just sitting there waiting to be looked at.
In addition to that, once the back and forth negotiation is complete, we can perform due diligence and move pretty quickly on closing the sale. Barring some huge red flag in the due diligence process, it’s highly improbable that an offer will be retracted or that a sale will fall through – we’re experienced buyers, we understand the transaction process, and we won’t get cold feet. Depending on the experience level of the buyer you end up dealing with through a broker, this may not be true in other cases.
Conclusion
While traditional online business brokers do a good job, we believe that the Wired Investors model offers significant advantages to sellers who work with us. Selling a business that you’ve built yourself from the ground up is a big deal, and you should consider all your options carefully before making a decision.
If you’re not sure which direction you want to go, feel free to reach out to us – we’ll be able to let you know whether or not we’re interested pretty quickly, and it doesn’t limit your other options at all.
