Selling a business isn't like selling a house. A business is a dynamic asset—customers, management, staff, stock, IP, and goodwill all contribute. The key is to always run your business professionally and profitably, focusing on value creation and risk mitigation. So why wait until you’re ready to sell? Here are my top 10 tips to prepare your business before you sell.

Publicising your intention to sell makes your business vulnerable to perceptions of instability among staff, competitors, clients, and suppliers. Small to medium-sized companies are delicately balanced, and the last thing an owner needs is staff hearing rumours that the business is for sale.

We are often asked at Oasis Partners, when there is market volatility or other geopolitical uncertainties, whether it’s still a good time to sell a business. The reality is that we are selling most of our clients to much larger corporate acquirers where there are strong synergies and reasons to do a deal.

At Oasis Partners we are seeing about half our transactions are shareholders selling for age related reasons, retirement or health. The other half are selling for other reasons such as wanting a change or feeling that a merger would provide benefits at their particular stage of the business lifecycle.

It turns out the average retirement age for Australians is the highest it's been since the 1970s. With apparently 20% of new employment since 2019 being people aged 55 and above!

What is the Process of Mergers and Acquisitions? Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) combine business entities and assets through various financial

Critical Strategies for Business Development Every Owner Should Know Enhancing your business’s value before a sale is crucial and requires

McKinsey expects gen-AI programs to cost $3 in change management for every $1 in development and reports that only 15% of companies surveyed attribute meaningful earnings from gen-AI activities. Large corporates have certainly developed compelling use cases. Out-of-stock monitoring (Woolworths), prediction of high-risk centres during extreme weather events (Suncorp) and streamlining of mortgage applications (Westpac) are but a few of many examples.

The self-storage market has fascinated me since I first started to notice the proliferation of Kennards, Storage King and many others 15 years or so ago. The basic concept is that as the cost of property rises and many down-size to smaller dwellings, we require a place to store the precious possessions that we can no longer house in our town house or apartment – so we hire a space elsewhere.

John Kehoe wrote a piece in the AFR on April 24th about how the “public service ‘ghost’ offices should rile taxpayers.” Seems like a fair point, if employees are now predominantly working from home (WFH), with 57% of public servants in 2023 doing just that, why are governments and others not reducing or renegotiating floor space and rentals?