Selling a business and choosing an agent

[rgp77]

I've run a growing business for 6 years that I've had valued by accountants reliably at circa £1.4-1.6m. I'm looking for an exit but having a nightmare choosing a sales agent. As its such an unregulated industry and everyone charges a fee upfront its been a case of eliminating the rouge ones and trying to find one that will follow through. This value puts us on the cusp of the "corporate" agents who work databases of clients etc rather than the smaller "advertisers" who simply advertise and see what interest they get. I've whittled it down to:

BCMS
Benchmark
KBS Corporate

Does anyone have any experience using these companies or has good personal experience with another you can recommend?

Edited by rgp77 on Wednesday 19th April 21:52

[rgp77]

Frimley111R said:

Yes, I know all of these companies and used to work for BCMS. BCMS are good but you may find their fees a bit high, iirc its about £50k upfront. Typical success fees are around 3% for all companies.

The ex owners of KBS are the current owners of Benchmark. I'd definitely avoid Benchmark, they are focused heavily on sign ups but far less so on successful sales. My knowledge of KBS is a bit out of date but they were improving from a poor start (now under new owners) but DS seems to have more experience of them.

You'll always find people moaning about M&A companies but selling is hard and requires a lot of work and often business owners scupper their own deals.

PM me if you want a couple of better options.

Edited by Frimley111R on Thursday 20th April 17:58

BCMS is £20k upfront, others are circa £10k. Of course BCMS justify this based on a range of big business sales, but they all have their slick marketing. When you consider how unregulated this industry is, and fact that only "advertising agents" exist at this SME level (rather than proper M&A companies that wouldnt even consider us) whatever choice I make feels like it'll be a gamble between wasting the money (as you said they just want the sign ups for their fee - and who wouldnt like to make £10k just for half a days initial meeting) and choosing the agent who will put the work in to make the final fees (circa £50k).

How on earth am I supposed to choose?