Sell Your Online Business FASTER: 5 Stages to a Premium Exit
Updated on April 2, 2026
Transcript
I just looked at 84 different deals we’ve sold at Empire Flippers this year to bring you some cool news on how you can get more people competing to give you a life-changing amount of money when you go to sell your business.
With this data, what I learned is that, on average, it takes about 102 days for you to sell a business. Once that business goes live on our marketplace, you’re looking at a little bit over three months to get an exit. Now, there are outliers in here, of course. The fastest one we sold this year was right around 34 days, with the longest one being well over 200 days. And no, price isn’t necessarily the reason as to why that happens.
We’re going to get into why that happens and what you can do to speed up your exit—to get acquired faster and for a much higher price than what most people can dream of. Let’s get into it.
Okay, as I mentioned at the top, 102-day average to sell—not that bad. Especially if you’re selling a $3, $4, or $5 million deal: a little over three months to become a multimillionaire. Awesome, right? That’s a deal most people would take, and that is a deal we’ve helped people do here at Empire Flippers.
But with this average, we need to put some caveats here, right? When we look at what is the difference between someone that has a business that sells very, very quickly versus someone who has a business that might take some time before the right buyer comes along, one of the biggest differences that I have seen—especially this year, where the market is a bit softer—is positioning and preparation.
So, you being prepared to sell your business is extremely important if we are going to position your business right. This is why I’ve often told people—like, if you’re a part of my cold email campaign, you may have even heard me say this to you—that even though you’re not ready to sell yet, maybe your exit timeline is a year or two years from now: if your exit timeline is in a year, you need to talk to someone like me. It doesn’t have to be me, but you need to talk to someone like me, unless you’ve sold a lot of businesses, to help you out. Because that timeline is actually pretty short to do anything meaningful to change your business in such a way that can get you the valuation or the exit that you truly want.
If you look at how valuations are done, usually the bulk of that valuation is going to come from how the business performed over the last 12 months of operation. Very, very key. So even if your exit is like, “You know, I want to sell one day, a couple of years down the road,” you should be talking to someone now about your expectations—about what you want—so someone like me can help you create a path to get to where you want to go.
Now, the other thing that’s very important here is: if you are prepared correctly, that means we can position your business correctly. That means we can really focus and concentrate on all the opportunities rather than looking at your P&L and being like, “Yo, why is this so wrong?” Instead, we can look at your P&L and share it with buyers like, “Look how great this is,” right? Or, “Look at these opportunities,” right?
A big part of selling your business fast is preparing well in advance before you ever sell the business. Things like your books, things like marketing channels and your acquisition costs, your sales team, your team in general—like how important you are to the business. These are all common-sense things that often get lost when someone’s like, “All right, I’m ready to sell.” Because usually when they don’t prepare, entrepreneurs are ready to sell when things might not be going that great, which we don’t want. We want you to sell the business as things are going great.
Now, you can see this sort of in our data. Again, there are caveats to all of this, but a business on our marketplace that sells within 50 days of going live tends to be 73% more likely to sell at the actual list price. Like, if we listed it for $1 million, you’re more likely to get a million dollars cash in your pocket versus if you’re a listing that is less prepared with less-good positioning. You are looking at probably a 15% to 20% discount from that listing price.
So in this case, a million-dollar business might sell for, say, $800,000 or $900,000, right? And that is if you stay on our marketplace for over 150 days—that becomes much more likely.
Now, that’s not all bad news, right? If you have an $8 million business, you get negotiated a bit more where, yeah, you might lose out on a few hundred thousand dollars in terms of the negotiation or in the upfront amount, but you still get millions and millions of dollars, right? So it’s still a good deal. But the faster you can go, the more likely you are going to sell for the actual list price that you wanted to sell for in the first place.
So how do you do it? How do you sell faster? What are the stages? Well, there are five main stages we need to talk about. I kind of talked about one, which is your preparation.
So before you ever, ever talk to a buyer, basically you need to start thinking like a buyer. Put on your marketing cap. Ask: why would a buyer want this? And if you can’t come up with an answer, well, that’s bad news. We need an answer, right? We need to figure out: why would a buyer want to buy what you built? Why is it so special that you deserve these potentially millions and millions of dollars right now?
An entrepreneur usually makes a massive mistake here where they overvalue what they have created because it’s often tied up with their ego, and it’s often done a lot of really good things for them. And so they’re valuing what I call emotional equity versus real equity. We want to focus purely on real equity: the clinical, cold analysis that a buyer is probably going to give you, right?
So we need to prepare our business to be able to do that, and what we need is clean financials. Don’t do it yourself. Hire an actual bookkeeper or accountant. If you come to us, we will do it for you, but it’s always better to have an actual accountant/bookkeeper familiar with your industry, familiar with your business, to help you set this up.
And by the way, if you are a seven-figure-and-up valuation—so, usually making over $30 grand a month in profit—you need an accounting system. You know, a lot of people start their business and it’s just a Google spreadsheet and a prayer. And hey, that’s fine. I’ve seen people go up to valuations of $7 or $8 million on systems like that. But if you are going to go and sell your business and you’re at that level, I highly recommend that you have some kind of QuickBooks or Xero locked in with a good accounting system. You’re doing your books every single month, because these are the most important papers, so to speak, that a buyer is going to be looking at.
In addition to your P&L, you want to have organized documentation of all your processes, your org chart, all that kind of good stuff—like who does what, when, what are the SOPs, what are the playbooks of this company.
And you want to take these two things—both your growth (ideally), your financials, and your SOPs and playbooks with what the business is doing, and ideally what you are not doing (because you shouldn’t be doing everything in the business, right)—and create a strong sales narrative.
Like: “Here is an agency where we get all of our clients through paid acquisition. We don’t have to rely on referrals, we don’t have to rely on organic content. I’ve already replaced myself with another person doing the ads. It’s not even me in the ads anymore. We have a full-on sales team handling all of it, and the fulfillment. This is ready to scale. All it needs is someone who wants to take it to the next level,” right?
So now we’re putting the pieces in place to put a strong positioning here of why buyers should want to buy this.
The reason why we want this strong positioning so bad, and we need to have those cleanup/prep documents to be able to create that positioning, is what we do with phase two.
Phase two is your initial listing day, basically. So this is more or less your first two to four weeks on the market. This is usually where you’re going to get the most amount of buyer interest, because it’s brand new, it’s the shiny object. And a lot of people are going to be “unlocking,” which is our terminology basically for NDAs, right?
So you’re going to have tons of people interested in your business as long as you have the strong sales narrative with a good brand positioning, right? A weak start can be a tough road ahead, but doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not going to be able to sell your business.
You might be one of those businesses that come up on the marketplace and it’s kind of crickets. And I wouldn’t say that’s normal—usually new businesses get a lot of unlocks—but there have been multiple times where I have seen a very good business, for whatever reason, just didn’t catch the fire that it should have.
And so you would probably end up getting a second wind, which will probably happen in month two if there’s still no genuine interest in the business that we’ve gotten so far. Basically, your listing gets remarketed to re-engage people to come look at this hidden gem that they might have missed in the flurry of day-to-day activity.
And that happens all the time, by the way. We have a buyer network of over 300,000 people. And yes, while they do look at our listings almost religiously every week, that doesn’t mean they are taking the time out of their week to dive deep into a single listing—a listing that they might actually want, but they just didn’t have the time.
So you end up being put into a remarketing to re-push that listing to get more eyeballs on your listing. Again, this is why it’s so important to have those clean financials, clean traffic analytics, all that kind of stuff. Because that listing page is kind of like your teaser, right? Your marketing ad to get this buyer to come in. And if they see something weird that is not explained on that listing page, they might not ever go deeper, even though it might be the perfect business for them.
So the next stage is buyer qualification. This is where you have buyers who are unlocking your business or signing the NDA. Maybe some of them are even signing an LOI with you and they’re wanting to go into more exclusive due diligence.
This is where you, as the seller—and we would help you with this, of course—would want to qualify these buyers. Because the last thing you want to do if you want to sell fast is allow yourself to get into a position where you are in exclusive due diligence with an unqualified buyer.
Now, Empire Flippers does help with this quite a bit because one of the things we do is we force buyers to verify their liquidity before they can ever truly do a deal. So they have to prove to us, like, “Yeah, I do have this two or three or five million dollars required to buy this business. Here’s my proof.” Sometimes they’ll do it as bank statements, stocks, or some other kind of financial letter from a banker or whatever.
Sometimes they’re private equity, which they don’t need as much, obviously, because private equity—we know they’re good for the money—but we verify that, yes indeed, they have the liquidity to go and acquire.
What you need to do on your end, if you’re using us at least (because we handle the first part for you)—if you’re not using us, you have to do both parts, which makes it much harder for you—is making sure you trust this buyer.
Have you built a relationship of rapport with them where you have faith: “Hey, yeah, I think they could acquire this business based on everything they’re saying, based on the advice from the broker here at Empire Flippers,” all that kind of good stuff? Do you trust them enough to really engage further? And if the answer is yes, great. That’s when you want to move into the next stage.
Usually this is when you go to the next stage, and that is due diligence.
So due diligence: we used to never see exclusive due diligence on the EF marketplace. Nowadays, I would say it’s pretty normal now. Exclusive due diligence is where a buyer signs a letter of intent with you, and they will go through usually a 60- to 90-day period. This is why our sales average is over 100 days. They use that time to really analyze your business.
Now, if you’re a smaller business, say less than $500,000, you’re less likely to enter into this kind of exclusive DD period. And if you do, usually it’ll be shorter too, like 30 days instead of 90 days.
But if you’re a bigger business, say like a $9 or $10 million business, you’re most likely going to be at that 90-day point before you really exit the business. Because there’s just a lot for that buyer to look through. They’re taking a big risk, right? They want to make sure that everything is solid, all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed, right? Very, very normal.
This is why it’s so important, if you want to sell your business fast, that you are very heavy on the qualifying of that buyer before you allow them to get in DD. Because once you’re in exclusive due diligence, you can’t share the deal with anyone else.
Part of the reason the buyer wants you to do that is because they’re going to spend all this time and money really analyzing your business. They want to make sure you’re not just going to go sell it to someone else while they’re paying lawyers or accountants, or they’re doing a QoE, all that kind of stuff, right? They want to make sure: hey, if they move ahead with the deal, the deal is still there for them to move ahead, right? So this makes sense. But this is again why you want to qualify that buyer before you sign this exclusivity clause.
Now, very, very important on this: when you enter DD, in order to make sure you keep up with the timeline, you should be reaching out to the buyer—and we do this too—every single week, asking for an update: “How are we doing on our timeline?”
And speaking of timeline, you should ask the buyer even before you get in DD: “Hey, could you send me a list of milestones and when you plan to finish those milestones before we sign this? So I kind of have a roadmap of where we’re going and when we’re supposed to be there.”
Because the key here is to make sure the buyer doesn’t drag their feet. Now, most buyers are not nefarious. They don’t mean to drag their feet. It just kind of happens. One thing happens where, you know, they get busy, or they can’t get you in in time for a certain check. Maybe their accountant is busy, or whatever, right? There are tons of reasons why DD can get dragged, too.
Even though you sign a 60-day exclusivity, they might extend it for 30 days. And you’re already so deep, so close to getting a deal, you say, “Sure,” but that pushes you back by another 30 days.
This is very, very important. Like: what is our plan? How are we working it? When do we know we arrived where, right? And that’s where the roadmap comes into play. So you want to do as much as you can to hold that buyer accountable and keep that momentum going.
Speaking of momentum, when you’re in this phase, you also want to make sure that you are hyper responsive to the buyer. Consider this like an extra part-time job in addition to running your business. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to commit to it if you’re going to sell your business fast, and ideally for a lot of money.
I cannot tell you how strange it is, but I’ve had many sellers in the multiple seven figures who have great deals and then it’s, “Hey, sorry, I’ll get back to it in three weeks. I’m going to Bali.” What? I thought they’d give you millions of dollars. Bali? “Gonna wait till after I make you a millionaire.” What are you talking about?
But that is very common. It’s very common that sellers self-destruct their own ability to do an exit just because they are not responsive. Now, if you’re not responsive, guess what? The buyer’s going to become not responsive. So once you get back from your Bali trip and, hey, here’s the data, the buyer may not even think you’re that serious to begin with and may take their sweet time as well. So you’re just kind of shooting yourself in the foot. Don’t do that. Be hyper responsive. Give the buyer no excuse for it to be slow themselves. Keep that momentum going as fast as possible. And the best way to do that is being hyper responsive and having that roadmap of the different milestones you’re going to be arriving at, right?
So the final stage here is negotiations and actually closing the deal. When it comes to negotiations, I have seen sellers, again, self-destruct here—where they destroy a deal or they greatly lengthen the time to be able to exit the business.
Now, usually how this happens is the buyer comes in with an amended offer from what the LOI was—which always happens, by the way. Don’t be surprised by that. An LOI is opening salvo. Not even the first offer. The first offer, in my mind, comes after due diligence is done. And then you are going to counter to that offer because they’re going to try to get you for as low as possible, right? And you want to sell for as high as possible.
And that is where the gap is that we need to figure out. We need to compromise. We need to negotiate. You don’t want to approach this as a showdown. It’s really a collaboration.
So a buyer should ethically want to give you as big an amount of money as reasonably possible, and you ethically should want the buyer to win by them paying a reasonable price for what your business actually is, so that they can make money from it, right?
If your goal is just to make money yourself—like, “I don’t care about the buyer”—this is going to be a tough one for you because you need to compromise and you need to problem-solve. You need to work together with this buyer to make sure the deal gets done. You guys are now a team. You need to figure out: how do we overcome these differences where we’re both happy and could walk away from the deal being glad we’ve done it, right? So that’s your goal here.
I’ve seen sellers nuke themselves by being uncompromising. You don’t want to be that. You want to be flexible.
I’ve also seen sellers nuke this because, say, that DD period was 60 days and it got extended by another 30 days, and you lift your valuation up higher because your net profit is suddenly way higher, right? So you want to now reprice your business.
But you repricing your business—and yes, it is more valuable because 90 days has passed, right—you have just set back the entire sales process by maybe another 60 to 200 days. So you’ve got to ask yourself: is it worth it for me to reprice the business at this higher valuation that might destroy the deal completely because the buyer is ready to go now at the agreed terms? Or should I just take those terms now, knowing, like, “Hey, this is a sure deal. I’m going to get more money today,” versus maybe not getting any money down the road if we do a reprice?
So that’s a very common thing I see destroy deals.
Another thing that I see destroy deals that sellers don’t often appreciate is if a buyer is getting a loan for your business, especially if it’s a commercial banking loan—like, say, an SBA loan, or really any kind of commercial loan. Maybe not private money loans, but banking, institutional, all that kind of stuff definitely is.
If your business is worth more now at the end of the 90 days and you want to do that repricing, and this buyer went through all the hoops to get the financing involved—which is not necessarily easy to do—and you want that reprice, all that work that that buyer just did on the loan side is worthless now because the deal has changed substantially.
And in terms of an SBA loan, it might be like: even if the buyer agrees with everything you’re saying, it could still be another two to four months before the new underwriting for the SBA loan is done. And now, because there’s more debt (and I’m assuming their equity injection has not changed much), they might not even be able to get approved for the loan. So this is another thing that could really kill your deal at the final phases of becoming potentially a multimillionaire, right?
So again, ask yourself: is it worth it for me to lose this buyer for, say, an extra $200,000 or $300,000? In my view, most of the time, not if you’re going to get paid like $2 or $3 million.
An extra $200,000 or $300,000 is nice, don’t get me wrong, but I would rather have a certain $3 million in the wallet versus like $3.2 million that takes me an extra three months. And by the way, in that extra three months, your business is probably going to be worth more than $3.2 million. So then you’re in this cycle. When do I cut it off, right?
So this is all things I’ve seen where sellers have really killed the deal and basically made it to where their deal’s not going to sell on an average of 102 days. It might sell in 300 days, right? Plus, you’re building up a ton more work for you because that buyer might just completely leave. Like: “Now this is too much.” And then you’re dealing with all new buyers, and you’re starting back at phase one of the whole process.
So those are the main stages that you need to be prepped for when you want to sell your business as fast as possible.
Now, I have helped sell smaller businesses in a week—like less than $100,000—for sure. A lot of those businesses sell very, very quickly. I think we just sold a $48k one in like 48 hours just a couple of weeks ago. So those businesses sell very, very quickly.
But if you are dealing with a bigger business, like a seven-figure or eight-figure business, you’ve got to appreciate these timelines. And every revision you do—especially at the very end of the deal, in that negotiation phase—can threaten to not just elongate the time to sell, but actually kill the deal to where you might lose out on ever being able to sell the business unless we get another buyer coming in there, right?
So don’t kick yourself in the mouth with your own foot, right? Especially when you’re going to become a multimillionaire anyways.
That’s my advice if you want to sell fast: be proactive, be prepared, be hyper responsive, and remember the name of the game—problem-solving. Be collaborative and be flexible with a qualified buyer.
And if you want help with getting a qualified buyer that can maybe make you into a multimillionaire, go ahead and click the link down below where you can start the selling process with us today. Talk to you soon.
