Why Bigger Businesses Sell 60% Faster (And for More Money)
Updated on April 2, 2026
Transcript
I’m going to show you why big businesses tend to sell 60% faster than smaller businesses—and it may not be for the reason that you think. I’m going to help you figure out how you can move from the slow lane to the fast lane when it comes to exiting your business for some seriously life-changing money.
Here’s what most business builders get wrong: they think bigger businesses take longer to sell because they’re more complex, when in actuality our data kind of shows the opposite.
When you look at premium businesses on the Empire Flippers marketplace—which we’ve sold over 88 of them at this point—premium businesses over $1 million actually take about 46 days on our marketplace from the time they go live to the time that they have “pending sold.” One of those funny things about the M&A world is: the bigger your business is, often it becomes easier to sell. Not harder, but easier.
So why is this? Why do these bigger businesses sell so much faster, and what does this mean for you as an entrepreneur that wants to go and exit your business?
First, let’s talk about the quality of buyers. Premium businesses tend to attract premium buyers that have capital, they have experience, and they have decision-making authority. They don’t wait for loan approvals like an SBA loan—though, in certain cases, they certainly do.
The reason why there is such a difference isn’t because the premium buyer tends to have a crazy amount of extra money than the other guy. Often, they tend to use a smaller amount of their money. It’s because they know how to structure deals that protect themselves. So the $2 million actually doesn’t seem that risky to a premium buyer. It’s actually the opposite: the $150,000 deal looks a lot riskier to them than a $2 million business.
Let’s talk about that, too. These premium businesses don’t just tend to sell faster, but they also tend to have much higher multiples. As your business gets bigger, there are just fewer businesses like what you have built. This means buyers are competing for you much more aggressively, versus buyers having tons of options on the lower end of the market. We see that in our data.
With a premium business, on average, they’re selling for 31.67x of their monthly net profit. Now, businesses underneath $50k—so very much on the small end—that’s closer to 19.38x.
A few other things are happening here. One is market perception. A million-dollar business signals success. Like I said, there’s not as many of you out there. It signals that there’s some kind of professional management system in check, and it’s reducing a buyer’s perceived risk.
Another one is better deal financing. The bigger your business is, the more money it makes. Higher net profit often means more opportunities for a buyer to finance the deal, where they actually sometimes use none of their own money.
We had an e-commerce store a few months ago that was like that. I believe it was valued—not even seven figures—like I think $700 or $800k, something like that. The person did some vendor financing and acquired the business. I think he paid off over half of that price just through vendor financing.
One of the things that opens up to you is this: a small $100,000 business making $3,500 a month—if you put a debt stack on it and then a bad wind happens, you have very little margin to do much of anything. You’re in some trouble, as we like to call it. But if you do some debt stacking on a $2 million business and a storm happens, like, yeah, you’re not in a great place probably, but you still have wiggle room—maybe like $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a month in terms of wiggle room that you can use to get out of that situation versus the small business.
The other reason why these businesses tend to sell faster is operational sophistication. If you’ve been watching the channel for any length of time, you know I often say you should become the most useless player on your team. This is what I mean.
Operational sophistication for a seven-figure business is just automatically perceived. You’re going to have better systems, you’re going to have clearer financials, which leads to buyers doing faster due diligence. Again, since the monthly profit is higher, this often means that the buyer, at least in their own perception, will have the profit margin that they need to both pay off their debt stack and also to create and hire some operational staff that are helping run the day-to-day of the business.
Now, if you’re buying a seven-figure business, there’s a good chance there are at least a few employees involved, so they might already even have that. But it allows them room to grow.
There are really three main things you want to do as a seller, especially in the seven-figure range (but you want to do this at every stage). In the seven-figure range, this can really help you move your business along to a hungry buyer willing to make you a millionaire.
First is systematic operations. Your business should not rely on you as the owner. You want to document processes, you want to train teams, and you want independent systems from yourself, because buyers buy machines of leverage. You want to present your business as the perfect machine of leverage—well, not perfect. You want to show them the bad stuff you did, too. That’s very important. But ideally, your business should be the systematic machine where the buyer can clearly see that the leverage they have is worth it.
Second is financial transparency. You want clean books, professional reporting, and clear growth metrics with a KPI scorecard of what is actually important to your business.
On financials, I was just talking to a friend. He makes a crazy amount of money, and he has no accounting system—and this is a very big business. That is a huge red flag for a buyer. Before you could even do anything, I told him, “Hey man, you need to go spend the $5,000–$8,000 over a couple months with an accountant to actually build an accounting system here for you, because right now you just have this random spreadsheet that’s super confusing. It’s going to throw every buyer off.”
On growth metrics with your scorecard, you really want to have one sheet—like a spreadsheet—that just has the five to 15 most important KPIs tracked weekly, tracked quarterly, and tracked yearly. Ideally, that shows how well or how bad you’re doing. This is important even if you don’t sell the business, right? You should always have a good temperature on what’s going on in the business.
Last is growth potential. You don’t want to be just profitable; you want to show you can sustainably scale. You want to show clear paths to revenue. Most sellers I talk to tend to wait until the moment that they want to exit before they really think about any of this.
If you wait—like, “I want to sell today”—and you come to Empire Flippers and we do a professional vetting and you’re sad about the valuation, you may not have been sad if you came to us six months or 18 months ago. We could have told you the valuation, and then you could have told us, “Well, I actually know I want to sell at this price.” Great—just do X, Y, and Z. Come back to us in six to 18 months and you’ll be there.
Because in six to 18 months, you can actually change your business from being kind of ramshackle—held by glue and duct tape—into positioning it as that machine of leverage that buyers are willing to pay you millions of dollars for.
This is why I always say you should think about this early. You should think about this often. You should get a professional valuation. People who actually do this don’t just listen to your entrepreneur friends who maybe sold one business. We’ve sold over 2,400 of them, so definitely go somewhere where there is a true professional looking at it and helping you decide what your value is.
The speed of sell is the other thing you want to think about. The faster you can sell your business is often more valuable than the price. That’s my final little tidbit for you, in terms of strategy: you want to have flexibility as a seller. I see sellers often be way too rigid—just not being flexible enough—and that keeps them from becoming a millionaire.
Now that you’re at the end of the video, here is a very powerful hidden tip for you. If you have a seven-figure business valued at, say, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7 million, one of the best things you can do—whether you use a business broker like us or not (which you should)—is understand how buyers buy deals.
If you can figure out the tools that business buyers use to actually finance and acquire deals, then when the buyer comes to you—say it was a $3 million business—and they offer you $1.5 million, you can say, “Hey, that’s great, Mr. Buyer, but if you also did a little bit of this type of financing, that can get us from $1.5 million to $2.5 million.”
Now you are helping the buyer solve their own problem, which is: how do I buy your business using as little of my own personal cash as possible? And that gives you, say, an extra $500,000 to $800,000 at the end of negotiations that you get up front, that you may not have gotten if you didn’t know about the different ways buyers buy businesses.
If you want help with that, you’re in luck. We’ve sold over 2,400 businesses. We’re happy to help you sell yours. Go ahead and go to empireflippers.com/sell, and you can get a free professional vetting valuation from us. You’re under zero obligation to sell with us, but we’re happy to help make you the next millionaire.
Talk to you soon.
