Owners selling a business receive a great deal of advice and it arrives from four sources with very different reliability. Professional advisers, brokers, owners who have sold before, and general reading. Each is genuinely authoritative about some things and confidently wrong about others, and the trouble is that the confidence does not vary with the authority. Sorting what to take from whom is the most useful filter an owner can apply, and it is not the same as ranking the sources.
Advisers are authoritative and narrow
Your accountant on tax and the financial picture, your solicitor on what documents commit you to. Within those boundaries they are the only reliable source and no general answer substitutes. Outside them, they are opinionated professionals like anybody else, and an accountant's view on whether to sell to a competitor is not accountancy.
Brokers know the market and have an interest
A broker knows who is buying, what has sold and what buyers currently object to, which is genuinely valuable and hard to get elsewhere. They also benefit from a completed transaction, which is mostly aligned with your interest and diverges on timing and on price against certainty. Take the market knowledge and weigh the encouragement.
Other owners, and what general reading is for
Owners who have sold are the best source on what the experience is actually like and the worst on what applies to you, because their deal had a structure and a sector and a moment. General reading, including this site, is useful for understanding what the process contains and what the documents are for. None of it should be the basis of a decision about your own deal. A practical filter for any piece of advice you are given: ask what it would take for the person saying it to be wrong. Advisers can usually answer that about their own field, and it is the question that separates knowledge from confidence in every one of these four sources.
Questions people ask about advice on selling a business
Who should I talk to first?
Your accountant, usually, because the financial picture takes time to present properly and the structure has tax consequences that are much easier to plan before terms are agreed.
Is free advice worth having?
For understanding the process, yes. For a decision about your own transaction, the question is not whether it is free but whether the person giving it knows your circumstances, and general sources by definition do not.
What does this site not advise on?
Valuation, tax and the legal meaning of any document, ever. It explains what things are and prices the work; it does not tell you what yours means.