Selling a business is described as a negotiation and is mostly an administration exercise interrupted by two conversations. Five stages, in order: getting ready, going to market, agreeing heads of terms, diligence, and completing. Owners expect the hard part to be agreeing a price. In practice the sales that drag, and a meaningful share of the ones that collapse, are stuck in stage one or stage four, and both of those are about documents rather than about money.
The five stages, and what each one actually is
Getting ready is assembling what a buyer will ask for and fixing what is obviously broken. Going to market is finding buyers, directly or through somebody. Heads of terms is agreeing the shape of a deal in principle. Diligence is the buyer checking that what you said is true. Completing is the paperwork and the money. Only two of the five involve negotiating, and they are the shortest two.
Stall one: not being ready when a buyer appears
An interested buyer asks for information and the owner starts looking for it. Weeks pass, the buyer's attention moves, and the momentum that made them interested is gone. This is entirely avoidable and it is avoided by assembling the pack before going to market, which also tells you which documents you do not actually have while there is still time to get them.
Stall two: diligence turning into an open-ended search
The buyer's list arrives, items are answered in email, more items arrive, and after a fortnight nobody on either side can say what is outstanding. The fix is a record rather than a thread: each request tracked against who asked, what was given and when. Sales rarely fail because an answer was bad; they fail because the process stopped feeling like it was moving.
Questions people ask about selling a business
How long does selling a business take?
Longer than owners expect, and the variation is enormous. What you control is the readiness stage: an owner with the pack assembled before going to market removes the delay that most reliably kills momentum.
Do I need a broker to sell my business?
Plenty of owners sell privately, particularly to a known buyer such as a competitor, a manager or a family member. What a broker mainly brings is buyers and process; if you already have the buyer, you are paying for the process.
What is the first thing to do?
Write the list of what a buyer will ask for, then find out how much of it you actually hold. That single afternoon reshapes the timetable more than any other early decision.