Finding the right business is the most time consuming part of business buying. Many buyers spend over 18 months looking for a business to buy. Given the effort, your ability to focus your search early and quickly spot promising acquisition targets is key to success. Some challenges you face at this step:

• Too many businesses to look at. You need to decide early where to focus your effort.
• Many businesses are overpriced.
• Good businesses are in high demand, and may be on the market just a few days.
• Initial financial information to assess the business may be limited to just a few essentials, such as revenue, cash flow, inventory, and FF&E.

As you review business-for-sale listings and offering profiles, use the Deal Check and business valuation Rules of Thumb calculations to quickly pre-qualify your targets.

ValuAdder offers you over 410 market Rules of Thumb for the most common small business types. All Rules are based on careful analysis of actual private company sale transaction data, and give you the range of selling prices other buyers have paid for your type of business.

You can use the Deal Check calculation in ValuAdder to quickly construct a viable acquisition proposal scenario, using the data from typical business-for-sale ads, such as revenue, cash flow, down payment, and seller financing terms. Working with ValuAdder, you can decide within minutes if the business is reasonably priced and has sufficient cash flow to warrant further investigation.