Selling Your Business?

Think of It Like Selling Your Home.

William Bissett’s mom is a real estate agent. And a conversation with her about an upcoming listing appointment turned into one of the clearest analogies for business exit planning he has come across.

The parallels between selling a home and selling a business run deeper than most people realize. And for business owners who are thinking about an exit, understanding those parallels might be the most practical thing they can do to protect the value they have spent years building.

Staging the Business for Sale

When a homeowner prepares to go to market, they don’t just stick a sign in the yard. They stage the house. They freshen up the paint, bring in furniture that highlights the best features, and call in an inspector to find the problems before a buyer does. The goal is to walk into the market leading with everything that is working and getting ahead of everything that isn’t.

Business owners preparing for a sale should be thinking the exact same way. What are the strengths of this business that a buyer is going to find compelling? How do we make sure those are front and center? And just as importantly, what are the things that a buyer’s due diligence team is going to find that we haven’t addressed yet?

The Buyer Will Always Call Their Own Inspector

Here’s the part that catches most sellers off guard, whether they are selling a home or a business. No matter how good everything looks, the buyer is going to bring in their own team to take a hard look at what they are buying.

For a home, that means an inspector who will work through the property top to bottom. For a business, it means a valuation team and a due diligence process that will surface every issue, inefficiency, and unanswered question the buyer can find.

And here is the critical piece. Every single thing they find becomes leverage. In a home sale, the buyer uses the inspection report to ask for repairs or a price reduction. In a business sale, the buyer uses due diligence findings to ask for discounts off your valuation. The blemishes you have lived with so long you stopped noticing them don’t disappear just because you have gotten used to them. They show up in the negotiation.

Getting Ahead of the Inspection

The owners who come out of a sale with the outcome they wanted are almost always the ones who did the work before going to market. They identified the blemishes themselves. They addressed what they could, documented what they couldn’t, and walked into the process with a clear and honest picture of what they were selling.

That kind of preparation doesn’t eliminate the buyer’s due diligence process. Nothing does. But it dramatically reduces the number of surprises, and surprises in a business sale almost always cost the seller money.

William’s takeaway from this analogy is a simple but important one. When a buyer pushes back on your asking price, they aren’t being difficult. They are doing exactly what you would do if you were buying something. They want the best business they can get at the best price they can negotiate. Understanding that going in changes how you prepare, how you show up at the table, and ultimately how the deal gets done.

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Selling Your Business? Think of It Like Selling Your Home | Portus Perspectives

 [00:00:00] I was talking to my mom recently. She’s a real estate agent, and as I was talking to her, she was talking about she’s going to a new listing appointment. And at that listing appointment, she was gonna be talking to the homeowners about what they can do to get their house ready for sale. And as I thought about that, I was like, man, that’s a lot like talking to a business owner about getting their business ready to sell.

The, you know, the similarities can, can go in a lot of different directions, but, you know, homeowners prep their business, right? They stage their house these days. Um, sometimes that means they call in an inspector to, to tell them what’s, you know, what the little things are. Potentially big things are wrong with their house before they go to market.

Uh, they put some fresh coat of paints, um, in different places. They might bring in some furniture to make it look like they, they really wanna highlight the good things about the home before they go to market. And you can do the same thing with the business, right? When you come in, you want. To highlight the good things about the business that somebody’s gonna buy.

Um, so that they’re not focused on, [00:01:00] on all the little blemishes. But just like when you go to sell your house, when you go under contract, they’re still gonna call in their own inspector no matter how good the house looks. And they’re gonna go through and they’re gonna find things that are wrong with your house.

And the reality is, it’s not your house, it’s your home. You’ve lived there for years and you’ve gotten very comfortable with it. Um, you know. That this little thing doesn’t work or this thing, um, is, is broken or, you know, these little things, but you’ve just kind of accepted them because it’s, it’s where you live, it’s your home.

Um, and so the new person wants to come in and say, well, if I need to fix that, what’s, what’s the discount? And it’s the exact same thing when you go sell your business. It’s not an inspector, but they’re gonna come in and do a valuation. They wanna know all those little things that are wrong with the business that they’re gonna have to fix, um, or that they think they’re gonna need to fix.

In order to make the business work for them so that, um, when those things that they need to [00:02:00] fix ultimately end up being discounts. Um, so they’re asking for a discount in the value of your business, just like a new buyer’s coming in and look at your house and asking for a discount on your house. ’cause both of them want to fix the home, your home, or your business.

Um, so that it operates in the way that they want it to operate, um, without those blemishes. Now the reality is we both know they’ll have new blemishes that come over time. Um, but they want to, they want to get the best business or the best home that they possibly can at the best price. Um, and if they, if they see issues with it, they’re both gonna ask for discounts to cover it.

So when you go sell your business, think about it kind of in the same way, um. That, you know, they’re just trying to get it right for them. Um, just like somebody’s buying their house, your house is just trying to get it right for them. ​ 

ORIGINAL MEDIA SOURCE(S):

William Bissett: Selling Your Business? Think of It Like Selling Your Home | Portus Perspectives

Originally Recorded: May 1, 2026

Portus Perspectives: Episode 12

By /Published On: May 5, 2026/