The CFO'S Perspective

Are you thinking about selling your business? Some business owners hear this question and respond, “No… well, not any time soon anyway.” But, if the answer is yes, even if you don’t plan on selling it soon, the time to start planning is now. If you think that selling your business might be in your 3-year, 5-year, or even 10-year plan, start getting the pieces in place now. Preparing ahead of time makes the process go more smoothly and quite often helps owners to get more value out of the sale of their business.

It’s never too early to plan for selling a business because there are a lot of steps that need to happen before coming to the table to sign the paperwork. Getting your financial house in order involves cleaning up your books, assessing the overall financial health of your business, putting together the information that buyers will need to enter into an agreement, working through the details of the deal, and then closing out the sale. From the early planning stage to final sale completion, the whole process can take several years to complete.

Imagine signing your company’s largest contract of the year with a new client. Sales staff celebrate bonuses, and production goes to work on deliverables. When final payment is due, however, the client defaults and won’t return your emails or calls. It doesn’t take long, or much effort, to learn that this isn’t an isolated incident with this customer. 

Could you have prevented this costly mistake by performing due diligence on that prospective client before signing on the dotted line? What are the benefits and risks of integrating this practice into your business process? And if you do, how would you go about conducting due diligence on prospective clients?

Business owners find due diligence daunting because of the cost and time required to do it effectively. They worry that the conversation with potential clients will be awkward to initiate and the process difficult to execute, lengthening the buying cycle. Furthermore, they fret about the risk of losing prospects from their sales pipelines, reducing overall conversion rates. However, the benefits far outweigh the risks of doing due diligence.