The TRUTH about Business Buyers (Every Seller Should Know This)
Updated on April 2, 2026
Transcript
When a seller goes to market, they’re expecting these amazingly well put-together buyers—maybe wearing a suit, you know, very straight-laced—and a deal where they just get all this cash, and the deal is going to be very, very easy. But then they’re disabused of that notion completely when they do go to market and they’re dealing with a first-time business buyer.
Now, I’ve been reading this book. It’s all about brokering, and it’s pretty good. There’s nothing in it so far that I disagree with. I think the guy has a lot of good insights, but one of the things he said that really struck home to me as being something very, very true—something that sellers never think about, but brokers are probably thinking about a lot—and I think this can help you as someone who wants to sell their business to go through the process a bit smoother with the right expectations set.
So, in the book he mentions that, on average, if you’re going to sell a business, you really need to have 35 to 40 buyers that have submitted some kind of LOI to look at the business in a deeper fashion to really be able to sell the business. And those numbers stack up with what we’ve seen at Empire Flippers. I think the average business gets somewhere between 30 to 100 NDAs signed when they go on the marketplace, somewhere around there. Very rarely does it get over 100 unlocks for, like, a one-week period.
And I would say most businesses we’ve sold probably have had a similar amount, maybe a little bit more than what he says. Just because we’re an online marketplace, our numbers are going to be more inflated than this guy doing more traditional brokering.
But the other thing he mentioned is, out of those 30 to 40 buyers, 90–95% of them are all going to be first-time business buyers. That means the business that they’re looking at—your business, potentially—is one of the first businesses that they’ve ever looked at to buy. And surely, if they do buy your business, it most likely is the first business they ever bought.
Now, at Empire Flippers, we have an interesting place where we sit. We have a lot of really experienced entrepreneurs who buy a lot of businesses from us all the time. We have private equity, family offices, international conglomerates, all sorts of really interesting cats browsing our marketplace. I mean, our buyer network is valued at over $14 billion in terms of investable liquidity, and that is done with actual proof of funds—they have approved to us that they have this kind of money, right? So we have a very big buyer network.
But even with everything I just said there, the vast majority of our business buyers are first-time buyers. We probably have more first-time buyers than likely any other M&A advisory out there, just partially because of our marketing presence. We get tons of leads every single week.
And this is interesting for you as a seller because no matter where you go—whether you use us, use someone else—just like this book says, there’s a very high chance, unless your business is, like, multiple eight figures or something, that you will be dealing with first-time buyers.
First-time buyers, their price ranges could be anywhere between, say, a side-hustle level of $100,000 all the way up to $5 million or even $7 million. I’ve seen first-time buyers go that large if they have the financial backing, usually through some kind of loan or financing or something like that, right? So this plays out in a lot of different levels of valuation—not just like low six-figure businesses, but even sometimes pretty high seven-figure businesses.
So, you as a seller, one of the things you need to recognize: in order to sell your business to these buyers, they probably have a lot of anxiety going on in their mind, right? This is the first time they’ve ever done it. Most likely, this will be one of the biggest financial purchases of their life, other than maybe their house. But there’s a good chance it might be bigger than their house—and honestly, a lot more risk.
Real estate has, in a lot of ways, less risk than buying a business. Now you could argue there; I’ve made the arguments both sides. But, in general, buying a business is going to be riskier than buying a piece of real estate. Now, the rewards are also way, way greater, which counterbalances that risk, right? The risk-and-reward formula there.
But you as a seller not only need to convince that buyer that you are worth what you are saying you are worth—and if you don’t know how to do that, come use Grandpa Empire over here. I will help make sure that happens because we’ll coach you on what your business is actually valued at.
But you also need to help assuage these fears and these anxieties that this first-time buyer is going through: Am I making a massive mistake? Are these numbers actually real? How do I know that they’re real? Is a broker trying to get one over me? Is the seller trying to get one over me? Are these traffic numbers real? Will the profit even stay the same when the seller leaves? Am I about to make the worst financial decision of my entire life?
These are pretty big existential questions.
So your job as a seller is not just to tell them how great your business is, but also help them see that, no, you can go run this thing too. Because I think a lot of times for first-time buyers—especially if they’ve never been an entrepreneur, which a lot of them haven’t; they might be a middle-management executive or something like that, but never been the full-blown entrepreneur yet—they might be thinking, “Wow, he’s an entrepreneur, he can do all this stuff. But I’m just an employee. How can I do that?”
So this is your opportunity to help coach this budding entrepreneur who wants to become an entrepreneur through acquisition: “No, you really can run this just like I do. Like, there’s not much difference between you and me. In fact, I’d say you probably have more skill than me.” Now, obviously, you want to be honest. There you go—I just butter them up like that. But, you know, speak truthfully, right?
A lot of times it is 100% true. Like, I’ve sold a lot of affiliate sites and e-commerce stores to people in middle management, or maybe they have an offline business, and the skill sets are not that crazy different from what they are already doing and what they understand.
The main difference is just the risk profile, right? Instead of being an employee, they’re the owner, and that brings additional anxieties: What if they make the wrong mistake? But what if they make the wrong mistake as an employee? That happens too, and people will get fired, right? So these are not as dissimilar as people think.
But for first-time buyers, it can be a big weight on their shoulders on whether they’re making the right decision. So it’s really imperative for you—and again, if you use Empire Flippers, we help you do this, but if you’re not using Empire Flippers, it’s really imperative upon you—not just to sell them on the business, but sell the buyer on the fact that they can run the business.
Be honest with them about where you think they might stumble or where you think they might excel. And there are a lot of areas where they probably could do really, really well. You kind of need to be their cheerleader, because you are already numbed a bit to the risk and the pain of being an entrepreneur. Because you built something, right? You built something that is doing good enough that it can be sold.
And this first-time buyer, there’s a good chance they’ve never built anything, right? There’s a good chance they never really ran a business. Maybe they ran a business line as a manager, but not as the entrepreneur. So this anxiety is constantly something you need to sell them on.
One thing you can do is make sure that all your numbers—dot your i’s and cross your t’s, all that kind of good stuff. So when you show them your P&L, also show them your three years of tax returns. Like, “Hey, look, these line up,” or show them your QuickBooks, or walk them through the process.
If you’re selling an e-commerce product, you can walk them through via Zoom or whatever. Have them buy one of your own products and then show them that product showing up in QuickBooks, in your bank account—all that kind of stuff—to show them, “No, this is totally real. Like, this is all true,” blah, blah, blah, right?
Show them your Google Search Console, your analytics, you know, whatever tool you’re using to show them. And if they go on the website, if you’re using Google Analytics, at least you should be able to show some real-time data. So let’s say they’re in some random town in Missouri—there might be a chance that you can show them with real live data of analytics: “Like, look, that’s you. I don’t know anyone else at this random time visiting my site at the moment,” right?
So you can prove to them all along the way that what they’re seeing is real. Because first-time buyers, that’s one of their big misgivings: “Is this Photoshop? Can I believe any of this?” All that kind of stuff, right?
And the other thing you need to understand is that though you deserve to get paid a big amount of money for what you’ve built, you also need to understand that, for the buyer, this is a lot of money for them. They are giving you tons of money to take over your problems, right? And we need to be cognizant of that: “Hey, yeah, this is a good buy. I think it has this kind of growth,” blah, blah, blah. “If you did X, Y, and Z,” all that kind of good stuff, right?
So just be aware of the psychological profile of the vast majority of your buyers.
And if you think about it kind of like a business coach—like, pretend you’re a business coach helping them buy a business, and you know in your mind it’s not your business, even though it is your business—I think you will do much better with the vast majority of buyers.
Because, one, you come off helpful. You come off authentic. You want to see them succeed—and you should want them to succeed because it’s very common. Like, I’ve helped sell over 2,400 businesses at this point, where buyers and sellers become business partners of some kind. At the end of the day, they start working together, start doing other projects together. It’s pretty—don’t want to say it’s super common, but it’s not super uncommon either, right?
So you want to see this buyer succeed. You never know what might happen down the road.
I always tell people, as a seller, you ethically want to sell your business for as high as possible—that is still a reasonable and very good acquisition buy for the buyer. Just like the buyer, their ethics should be: “I want to give the seller as much money as possible that is reasonable, that still allows me to have a good deal to grow the business.”
So just remember: you, as a business seller, the vast majority of business buyers that can make you rich—make you into a multimillionaire—typically are going to be first-time business buyers. And first-time business buyers have all those anxieties, have all those doubts. A lot of it is self-doubt—not doubt necessarily in the business, but doubt in themselves.
So you coming to them from a coaching angle to help them can seriously help you get the deal done.
All right. Hope you enjoyed the video. And if you did, and if you don’t want to do that hard work of coaching a buyer, come on over to Empire Flippers. Go to empireflippers.com/valuation-tool and get a free valuation from us, and let Greg help you.
Come on, my lady. Talk to you later.
