Reasons to Sell Your Home Services Business
Whether you’ve owned your business for 5 years or 50, you may be considering whether running that business is still what you want to do. Maybe you’re dealing with health or lifestyle changes or your interests are taking you in a new direction. There are plenty of reasons you might decide to sell your small business, from practical ones to more emotional decisions.
Here at Southern HVAC, we’ve accompanied many home services business owners through their selling journey. Here are some of the primary reasons business owners decide to sell.
Why You Might Want to Sell Your Small Business
It’s natural to feel some hesitancy about posting your HVAC business for sale or selling your small plumbing business. But there are plenty of valid, smart reasons to do so, including:
- Business- and work-related reasons, which include general work fatigue, market uncertainty, partner disputes, or supply chain issues. Maybe you own a family business, but there’s no plan of succession or nobody interested in taking the reins from you.
- Lifestyle changes, such as retirement, illness, desiring time to pursue a new hobby or interest, and wanting to spend more time with family. Perhaps you want to move to a new area or would like more time to travel freely. Or maybe you want to use the money from the sale of your business to pay down personal debt or diversify your wealth. Maybe you’re devoted to a charitable cause and would like to put some of the funds from the sale of your business toward supporting that cause.
All of these are real-world examples of why you should sell your small business if you decide that the time is right to do so.
Family Businesses: Additional Considerations
Family businesses can be trickier to deal with, at least on an emotional level. If you’re running a family electrical, HVAC, or plumbing business, it can often feel like you’re carrying not only your own goals and dreams but also those of your predecessors and anyone who might come after. And it’s often hard to let it go, even when you know it’s for the best.
If you’re thinking about selling a family business, there are a few other things to consider:
- Be sure that there isn’t another family member who wants to step up and take the business over.
- Communicate clearly with any other family members who might have a stake in the business. This not only protects you emotionally but also in case of any sticky legal situations.
- Try to work with a seller who will keep your family business’s name, if you’d like to see your family’s contributions continue to be honored. Here at Southern, our business centers (those businesses that are acquired by our company) keep their name and branding. It sometimes helps to know that the family name will go on, even if the family sells the business.
The next step is figuring out how to sell your company, but that’s often easier than making the decision to sell in the first place, and we can help with that.