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3 companies looking to acquire my business and I feel lost. (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by spiderpigparty@alien.top to c/entrepreneur@indiehackers.space

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Hi everyone,

31 years old, no kids.

I own a small business, and have received offers in the region of £750k. Plus cash in the business would give me a total equity value of around £900k on exit.

I started it 5 years ago now, with the dream that one day it could be sold. Well that day has come and I’m in a very fortunate position of having 3 companies submitting offers.

But, instead of feeling excitement, I feel a sense of dread that I’m doing the wrong thing. This business has been everything for me for 5 years. At points I have genuinely thought it would end up killing me and through the toughest days and weeks the thought of the end goal was often what kept me going. So not to be feeling a huge rush of excitement and relief right now is a surprise to me.

I have 2 options.

Exit the business and take the money. in this situation I would invest the profits in property and lead a considerably lower stress, yet comfortable lifestyle.
The second option is reinvest our profits and try and take it to the next level. This would invoicing recruiting, advertisement and investment in our general operations. I’d be committing to another 2 - 5 years and going back in balls deep. Obviously the risk here is we dramatically lower our profitability by doing so and fail to scale any further. I worry we may then miss what could be a once in a lifetime opportunity to sell a business for decent money.

Not really sure what I’m expecting to get by posting this, but if anyone has thoughts or has sold a business themselves, did you experience this? Did you regret it post sale? All advice appreciated.

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[–] Dmains@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

If you take the money now. You will have a fat tax bill, you'll be left with a nice amount - but not a life changing amount.

Its unlikely you will regret the second option. Even if somehow you fail. The lessons you will learn from stage 2 of growth are worth it and will elevate the way you operate as a person and entrepreneur forever. You also have something you know and seem to know how to scale.

I advised a company 10 years ago in the same place. We decided to stay the course on and grow it - but we made a big investment into the best person we could afford that would run the day to day (we paid $300k for an killer sales guy who could eventually run the business). Today that business does 4X that revenue and is run by the person we recruited - my client takes 2.5X the owner distributions they did back then and does very little work.