Dropping a Business For Sale listing
Even though we are diligent in screening and reviewing our clients, their business financials and fundamentals prior to engaging them and listing their internet businesses for sale, occasionally we have some website businesses that precipitately descend in their traffic, revenues and other fundamentals during the course of selling their business.
Sometimes, as in quarter 4 of 2008, it was due to an overall sharp down turn that most businesses suffered a setback. However, many times it has to do more with how the seller is operating their business, or has been running it prior to contacting us to sell.
The most common reason for business revenue atrophy seems to be correlated with the seller’s dip in focus, passion about their business or just laziness! Once their mind is taken off their website business and they are not actively working on evolving or improving it, many online businesses start to decay – some slowly and others rapidly. Too many sellers, especially ones that have created what are termed as passive revenue websites – such as a niche content site that serves up ad-sense ads or affiliate links that they earn commissions – sit back in cruise mode and don’t continue to push the envelope and continue with their content and link building to improve their search engine positioning or even dominance.
We always counsel our clients to continue working their internet business for sale as if they were planning on keeping it and striving to hit the next elevated traffic and revenue targets. Websites for sale that show progressive earnings and traffic growth are always more attractive to buyers and sell for larger multiples in the end.
Recently, we have experienced a few listings where our clients have pretty much dropped the ball and let their online business’s atrophy to the point where we can no longer get behind the opportunity and continue selling it for them in good conscience – even at a fire sale. Consequently, when it hits this tipping point, it is time for us to jettison the business listing from our current websites for sale page and file it in archives where it will rust along with other sites that met the same fate because of their truant owners that inevitably were trying to dump their business before it started the downward inertia.
To preserve our websites reputation of presenting quality internet business for sale opportunities, we regularly assess our inventory and have taken to culling the sites that no longer measure up to our standards or our educated and savvy buyers’ standards who subscribe to our buyer alerts or regularly visit our website and who count on us to deliver a quality product and service.
