The Smart Way to Find Businesses to Buy

Business buyers – save your money and don't pay for access to listings.

Business brokers have multiple ways of finding buyers – email lists, local networks, strategic outreach, and advertising on online platforms.

The majority of these platforms charge brokers fees to list businesses but don’t charge buyers to search and reach out.

I believe this is the way it should be.

Charging brokers to list puts the onus on us to invest in our listings and not spend money advertising expired listings.

If a site shifted to charge buyers access to listings, I believe there would be a significant increase in scams targeting buyers.

The way these sites are setup, the brokers deal with much of the folks with bad intent. Any business broker who has been around for a few years has an email box full of them.

But that’s our job and frankly, we’re better at spotting those folks than the buyers.

It’s our responsibility to sellers to cast a wide net and put listings in places where buyers can easily find them.

We do this so there is more competition in the buying process plus we never know where the right buyer will come from.

I speak for myself but I don’t keep secret lists of buyers who I share the best, off-market listings with and only put less desired ones up publicly.

This means I deal with tons of spam inquiries on a daily basis. But that next listing I get, it’s going right up online again.

Save your money and keep getting on email lists of brokers, sharing your criteria, and searching online. It takes a lot of time and effort but it will payoff.