3 Things You Need to Sell Your Business for Millions
Updated on April 2, 2026
Transcript
If you’re an entrepreneur, you probably want to sell your business at one point. And it would be pretty nice if, when you did sell your business, you got paid a million dollars—or even better, several millions of dollars.
Well, that’s awesome, because the news I’ve got to share today in this video are the only three things you truly need, regardless of the business model that you’re in, to sell your business for seven figures and maybe even multiple seven figures. And those three ingredients—we’re going to cover them right now in this video.
All right, so ingredient number one, the first and most sacred tenet of selling a business for millions of dollars, is your net profit: money coming into the door, being cash flow positive.
Now, if you’ve been in and around entrepreneurship for a while, especially in the tech space, like, “Greg, all sorts of businesses sell for tons of money that make no profit.” Like, yes, that is true, but they also usually have raised millions of dollars, have crazy market share. There’s a lot of other things happening with those businesses, and those businesses are the exception, not the rule.
So in this video we are talking about the rule, because most of us are going to be playing by the rules when it comes along this journey of selling a business for millions of dollars. So if you’re not some crazy Silicon Valley tech startup where you might not even need to make revenue to sell a business for millions of dollars, then that means you must trust in the process of having as much net profit as possible.
Now, in order to sell a million-dollar business, a seven-figure business, the minimum net profit you need usually is right around $30,000 per month in net profit. So if your goal is to sell your business for seven figures and up, you could put on your first goal: make $30,000 per month in net profit. That should be kind of your guiding North Star.
Now, 30 grand a month in net profit, depending on where you are in your journey, it might sound like a lot. It might sound like nothing. To me, I have helped create over 90 millionaires at this point. Like, at Buyer Focus, we’ve sold over 2,500 businesses. Thirty grand a month is not that crazy to me personally these days. In my mind, one good ad campaign, one good funnel can get you there if you know what you’re doing.
So if you’re just starting out, it’s the only thing you need to worry about. Don’t worry about anything else.
And by the way, these three things apply, like I said, to pretty much any business model. So whether you’re Amazon FBA, or whether you’re a content site, whether you’re a YouTube channel, whether you’re a marketing agency—it doesn’t even matter. In fact, these things apply even if you’re running an offline business for the most part, because these are the three core elements that buyers are willing to shell out a million dollars-plus for, basically. Right?
So first step: 30 grand net profit per month.
Now if you want to sell for like $2 million, then okay, let’s up that to 60 grand net profit per month. You want to sell it for 4 million? Okay, great, let’s go to 120 grand net profit per month.
Now, I am using a very fast and loose evaluation with that. There are businesses that will sell for much more than a million dollars at 30k profit per month. But we always want to act conservative, and conservatively our valuation should be right around a million dollars if we’re making 30 grand profit per month. So that’s step one.
Step two is: you are not active in order to create the revenue.
Now, what do I mean by that? I’m not talking about passive income or anything like that, because passive income is a bit of a lie. It’s not really real. Even rental real estate—you’re probably doing something to keep that going, right? There’s some activity you are doing with online businesses. Just like normal businesses, there is activity that must be done in order for the business to succeed.
But the key thing is, in order to make revenue, you do not need to be active at the same moment that the revenue is made.
So I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you are running an Amazon FBA business. Someone goes to your product listing, sees your sneakers, they buy your sneakers. You might be sleeping, you might have been on a plane—who knows where? You were watching Greg’s YouTube videos instead of working. Shame on you, actually. Thank you. Please subscribe.
But the fact is, you did not have to one-to-one interact with that customer to make that revenue happen. You already have systems—whether it’s marketing funnels or whatever—set up in place for people to give you money for the thing you do.
Now, depending on your business, this is really, really simple to do, or it takes a little bit of meandering to kind of fix your business to make sure it’s not relying upon you. And some businesses are much more prone to where you are active to make the revenue than others.
So with Amazon FBA, yeah, you are active in terms of doing the product research, the sourcing, the logistics, maybe the Amazon ads—all that kind of good stuff. But you are not specifically one-to-one active when someone buys your product.
So when someone goes and buys your business for a million dollars, they don’t need to be you. The business can be run on these systems because it’s not reliant on you.
Now, a business where this is the opposite end is usually marketing agencies, especially smaller marketing agencies. A lot of marketing agency owners, they will get customers with their own personal brand, which is a no-no when it comes to wanting to sell your business for seven figures.
Like, nothing wrong with personal brands. I have a whole video, though, of me kind of crapping on them. You can go watch—I’ll link it down below.
But in that business, not only are you actively required to create the revenue at that moment, but you’re also being active in terms of even getting people to you, right? Because if you’re driving all that business through your personal brand, what is the buyer going to be when they acquire the business? Well, they’re not going to be your personal brand, right? They can’t rely on your personal brand because that’s you—that’s not them, right? So that makes the business inherently weaker.
Now, another thing where agencies and service businesses in general kind of mess up on is the sales call. So if you are trying to sell a marketing agency for seven figures, it cannot be you doing the sales calls. It needs to be someone else. Ideally, at least if you want the best potential chance of selling your business for seven figures, it should not be you actually doing the sales calls.
In fact, it really shouldn’t be you doing anything other than managing and overseeing the team, right? And even then, you might be able to hire a manager at a certain point where even that is kind of taken away from you.
And what we’re trying to do here is: one, we want to make the business big enough—so 30 grand a month to hit the magical number of a million dollars. But we also want to make the business systemized. We want to sell a system of leverage to the buyer where it doesn’t require you anymore, right?
Where I always joke: you want to be the most useless person on your team, right? Your team should be better than you, ideally. Or you should have processes and systems in place where they don’t need to rely on you as the bottleneck to create actual revenue.
Now, the third thing is, in some ways, kind of the hardest one to do. Because you can do the first two steps I’ve said within a year—you can hit those metrics.
Will most people hit that? Probably not. Most businesses fail, right? Like, 50% of businesses shut down in the first year after opening. Right. It’s not crazy unrealistic that you can hit those kind of numbers and have that kind of team. If you’re, say, in the agency model, within a year you definitely can do that.
But you probably still can’t yet sell your business for seven figures yet. And this is the third part you need, which is age: your history. Are you year over year growing? Are you year over year declining? Are you year over year staying stable? Right? These are very important.
And if you’re only eight months old, well, there is no year over year. The buyer doesn’t know.
And the unfortunate truth is, you can sell a business for less than 200 grand within 12 months of starting. Absolutely, you can do that. You have to work really, really hard, and it has to be making a lot of money to be able to do that. But you can do it. Buyers would be willing to stomach that.
And when you get up to like a million, 2 million, $3 million, and your business has only been around for eight months, there are very few buyers, if any, that are going to buy an eight-month-old business for a million dollars.
In fact, the average business, according to my industry report (which you should go download—link in the description down below), the average business we sold was right around, like, a little bit over three years, four years old before they sold on our marketplace. And that’s a very good sweet spot for digital businesses, right between that three-to-five-year mark.
Because buyers, what they’re looking for is not just good stable profitability, and the fact that this is a system of leverage, so they’re not just buying a job for themselves, but also that this business has seen some stuff, has overcome some challenges, survived some storms, and because of that there’s a good chance it will survive more storms. Right?
There’s this whole rule in the M&A world called the Lindy Law—the law of Lindy. Basically, what it means is if a business has been around for 20 years, there is a very high likelihood that it will still be around in 20 years.
Now obviously, take that with a grain of salt. Obviously that’s not completely true, but there is a grain of truth in that—in the fact that the business has been resilient to even last that long. Like, most businesses, 60 or 70% are gone by year 15. Actually, it might be higher than that. It might be like 80, 85% of businesses are just gone by year 15, right?
So the fact that the business is still around, they’re like in the top 10% of all businesses in terms of just longevity alone, right? That says something about the business.
Now, for our purposes of selling a seven-figure business, what I would recommend is a minimum of three years. Because most of the time buyers will want to see like three to five years of your P&L. At that stage, you might be able to get away with just two years, though. I don’t recommend it.
And the reason why I don’t recommend it is because if you only have two years on such a bigger business—a seven-figure business—you will most likely take a hit to your multiple because it’s still quite young. Like, the buyer can’t look at your P&L and see a multi-year trend. They can see a two-year trend, which, hey, fads have lasted longer than two years before, right? So that doesn’t exactly give them this certainty that they need to really shell out that money.
So this is why I say this is the more frustrating part of selling your business for millions. Because it’s not like you can just speed up time—except for if you do what I’m about to tell you right now.
Because there actually is a way for you to skip that entire timeline. And this is not the right move for everyone, but it might be the right move for you, and it certainly is the right move for Greg’s KPIs over here, which is buying a business.
Because if you buy a business instead of building a business, guess what? You already have—I just said the average business is between the three-to-five-year mark on our marketplace. You inherit that timeline. So you could buy a business from us that already has three years. You go and build it up for a year, maybe a year and a half, and now you have a four-and-a-half, five-year-old business that you can come around and sell with us and not have to worry about this timeline.
So one of the most surprising things to me that consistently surprises me, even though I’ve been in the industry for so long, is the people that make the most money in the world of M&A is not the seller selling for millions. It’s the buyer who buys multiple six-figure businesses. They build them up, and then they come back to me and sell them for millions.
This, by the way, is why I always tell buyers like, “Hey, it’s not the end of the world if you buy a business that’s overpriced.” Like, we tend to be pretty realistic when it comes to our prices, but we’re brokers, so buyers are always going to say we’re overcharging, right? Which we really aren’t, in my view. But they’re always going to say that.
But even if we were overcharging, let’s say we overcharged by 30%, which is definitely not true, but let’s say we did, right? There’s a buyer—he bought a business from us for $180,000. So let’s say that was 30% overpriced, got a terrible deal, right? Well, 22 months later, he is now selling that business with us for over a million dollars.
Do we still care about the extra 30%, even though that didn’t even exist? No, of course not. He’s over the moon. He’s selling the business again with us, right? Obviously, if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t come back to sell the business with us, right?
But that is one of the cool things about buying a business over any other kind of asset. Like, you can’t do that with real estate, for instance, but you can do that with a business if you’re willing to put in the work.
So if you want to skip the frustrating timeline aspect of M&A—of these three ingredients—just go and buy a business first rather than go build one. There’s a bunch of other benefits you get, obviously, when you go buy a business instead of building one from scratch, but one of the biggest is you get to skip ahead in time.
The shortest sale we’ve ever had—in Empire Flippers, we sold over 2,500 businesses—the shortest sale we’ve ever had was a buyer who bought a business from us and then literally sold that business with us in like an hour after acquiring it to the buyers that were competing for the business. We hadn’t even handed the business over to the guy, and he had already sold it.
Now, that is a very risky move. Would never recommend you to do that as, like, being a core investment thesis—just sharing, like, the power you have as a business buyer to really just skip that whole ingredient of waiting for three to four years when you go and start building something.
So if you want to go fast to sell your business for millions of dollars, that’s how you do it.
So a repeat of the three ingredients: be making at least $30,000 per month. Number two, you are not actively required to be present to create the revenue. Either you have ads, you have a sales team, or whatever, right? You are removed from the business, and ideally no personal brand is involved. And three, be at least three years old, ideally a little bit longer—but three years old is kind of the minimum.
And of course, if you want to go faster, buy a business, build it up, come back to Greg, and we’ll help you sell it for millions of dollars. Talk to you soon.
