Selling shares in a private business

[Guvna]

If you own a business and want to raise money by selling shares in your company.... how do you go about it?

[Beardy10]

Hard to know where to start. You definitely need to work out a realistic valuation (ask your accountant to help you with that) and also you need to put together a presentation explaining your business, showing both it's historical profitability/turnover/margins/costs etc as well as what you forecast for the future including what assumptions you are making for those if they are predicting growth higher than your business has already demonstrated. I'd also say you need to know who your competitors are and what your competitive advantage is etc.

It really depends how much you are looking to raise and whether you want a silent partner or not. Oh and you will definitely get asked why you want to sell some of your business. If you are looking for a silent partner to be a minority shareholder I think you need to show there is significant growth in the business to get any interest, being a minority shareholder with the rest of the shares owned by one majority shareholder is not a very attractive proposition. If anything goes wrong it's a shocking position to be in.

You could do worse than outline your business on here and what you are trying to achieve and see what people say. It'll get shot down pretty quickly if it's not a runner.