Internet sites, business brokers, and boutique investment banks. Scores of sites promise to make online deal connections. New ones seem to pop up almost weekly, and many are just plain sketchy. “Seller, beware,” says Kevin Mulvaney, a professor at Babson College. “It’s possible to drum up great leads on the Internet. But there is also a lot of junk out there.”
The hands-down winner: BizBuySell.com, based in San Francisco. They also like BizQuest.com and Businessforsale.com. BizBuySell.com has the advantage of reach - it gets more than 20,000 hits a day.
A business can advertise on the site for $55 a month, and for $100 a month the announcement is e-mailed to prospects. Potential buyers can search the site’s 38,000 listings by size, geography, and type of business.
In 2005, Lee Dodd used BizBuySell.com to peddle Eat My Flames, which sells a kit that makes a car’s exhaust pipe shoot fire. (No, it’s not street legal, if you are curious.) Eat My Flames is profitable, with $175,000 in revenues, says Dodd, who lives in Wills Point, Texas. He sold it for $80,000 to a retiree in Wind Lake, Wis. It’s the third sale that Dodd, a 27-year-old serial entrepreneur, has made using BizBuySell.com. “I always get a good variety of calls from all over the country,” says Dodd.
The downside of listing your business online? The sale is suddenly there for all to see, including your employees. Gulp!
Photo by Andy Lock.
albion on November 18th, 2006 at 8:21 am
Thanks for the great websites. Entrepreneurs appreciate a good resource when it comes to finding new businesses!