You’re getting ready to sell your business. You have a buyer and want to get the process moving as quickly as possible. Here are 3 top tips for speeding up the process, without compromising safety.
Prepare your parts
Before buying your business, the buyer will conduct a kind of audit of your business, looking at every aspect of it. You’ll need to provide a range of documents, such as tax and accounting documents for the last few years, employee employment contracts, a list of current contracts, etc.
More often than not, the customer is missing parts. It could be the general terms and conditions of a leasing contract that he has lost and that the leasing company has failed to return despite repeated requests, a lost employment contract, or a certificate from a less-than-responsive accountant.
Our advice is to start as early as possible, listing the parts available to you, and looking for missing parts.
Purging pre-emptive rights
One of the main reasons for slowing down the sale of a business is the purging of pre-emption rights.
The right of pre-emption is the right granted to a person to have priority for the purchase of your business in the event of it being put up for sale. There may be several pre-emptive rights: for employees, for the municipality in certain cases, but also for a co-contractor, if you are a franchisee for example.
To purge a pre-emptive right, you must inform the person holding the pre-emptive right and wait a pre-determined period (usually two months) for them to come forward before you can sell.
However, to move more quickly, you can ask these people for certificates stating that they do not intend to acquire your business, leaving you free to proceed with the sale before the pre-emption period expires.
It is therefore particularly important to identify existing pre-emptive rights early on in the process, in order to settle this formality as a matter of priority.
Give your board plenty of warning
As a matter of economics, many company directors wait until they are as far advanced in the process as possible before notifying their lawyer.
However, in the event of a dispute, your lawyer will not have been able to review the letter of intent or the promise to sell.
If you try to save a little, you could end up with a big loss.
If you’re planning to sell your business, we strongly recommend that you discuss the matter with your usual advisor as soon as possible.
What’s more, this will enable him to get organized and guarantee you maximum reactivity during the busy times of the transfer.
