ENTREPRENEURS looking for corporate ‘bargains’ over the festive season have been in luck as thousands of businesses are up for sale across the UK.

Those with ready money have been able to pick up businesses cheaply from specialist brokers and listing agents.

Business Sale Report, a leading listing service, has seen a 30 per cent rise in the number of owners advertising in December compared with November. Director Robert Moore says in addition to sales of distressed businesses, entrepreneurs who previously held back because the market had been depressed are now selling.

‘If you have cash and are able to move quickly, it’s a good time,’ he says. ‘Any business where it is easy to see future cash flow is in demand.’

Christopher Jones of business broker Sunbelt says there are lots of buyers in the market looking for the right opportunities. ‘We’re seeing buyers coming out of the corporate world looking for cash flow,’ he says. ‘There are also strategic buyers, picking up equipment.’

Kevin Uphill, managing director of business broker Avondale, says: ‘Buyers are there. After all, where do people put their cash now?’

Buyers can also try to negotiate lower rents and cheaper loans. The Government is pressing banks to lend to small firms and buyers are even finding it possible to borrow from the vendors through deferred payments.

But alongside the festive crackers there are some real turkeys with hidden problems. ‘ There are opportunities, but you have to be pretty savvy,’ says Moore.

Buying a business that has already gone into administration is fraught with difficulties as the administrator must realise funds quickly, putting a tight deadline on deals. Buyers also have to question whether a business will withstand the departure of the owner, who is often the founder.

Uphill says: ‘ The biggest single issue is the quality of the information on smaller firms – without visibility, there are high risks. There are real opportunities but if you cannot see the risks, don’t touch it.’

Many of the potential buyers are first-timers, says Jones. But this market is also proving attractive for existing businesses that are seeking to increase their market share.

Chartered accountant Russell Bowyer, 47, from Linton, Cambridgeshire, is convinced that doing deals in a recession is a good idea and he is negotiating to invest in Deep Clean, a nationwide cleaning firm that specialises in commercial kitchens.

Bowyer has a long record of business ownership, albeit in the care and accounting sectors, and he has been looking to expand his portfolio for some time.

He believes Deep Clean fits the bill because insurers require all commercial kitchens to be cleaned. There is competition, of course, but Bowyer says: ‘There is a good market.’

Bowyer, who is a client of Sunbelt, adds: ‘There are thousands of businesses for sale and far fewer buyers.

‘Interest rates are also lower so, in theory, you can get cheap money. If you buy in a boom, there is more competition from other buyers and interest rates are higher.’

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Honesty in business is as it is in life and a must and extremely important.

If you are about to sell your business or if you are in the middle of selling it then make sure you are honest from the outset…not only with the broker, if you are using one, but also with potential buyers.

If you tell lies at the outset or during the initial stages then it is very likely this will be found out at the due diligence stage of the selling process. The problem with telling lies is that if they get found out you may put off potential buyers and lose their trust.

Put yourself in the shoes of a buyer and you will know that they will feel both stressed and worried about the whole process. Don’t make it worse for them by putting any element of doubt in their mind…they may be thinking if you are lying about one thing you might be covering up any number of other things and they may well walk away from the deal.

I remember going to look at a business which was being advertised as turning over around £8,000 per week, when in fact it was only turning over around £4-5,000 per week. Admittedly, at some point in the past this business had been doing this level of turnover and more, but the broker had not bothered to update their advert. This then wasted my time and their time in looking at a business which was highly over valued.

Always remember that with the majority of business sales that it is a ‘Buyers Market’ and rarely is it a ‘Sellers Market’ – which means that when you have a buyer on the hook, as it were, you want to play them well and nurture the whole business sales process from start to finish.

Article by Russell Bowyer

A marketing partner is another business which can complement your business or help to refer new customers your way in exchange for reciprocal referrals.

A good example of this is if you leave some of your leaflets in the sales area of a fellow business, preferable in the same town or area as your business and in exchange you have their leaflets in your reception area.

To take this concept a little further you could introduce promotional schemes; for example…you could put on your sales literature “When you buy a pizza you get 20% discount off of XYZ video store”. At the same time as you offering this you can get XYZ video store to offer a similar promotion so that when a customer rents a video they will get 20% off pizzas at ABC pizza store.

If you tie people in like this you are more likely to get customers from the video store visiting the pizza shop and visa-versa…thereby both businesses will benefit. Many a time when someone gets a takeaway they will also want to watch a video, so this is a great fit for a pizza type business.

If you do not own a video store or indeed a pizza shop, then I am sure you can think of some great complimentary business links to your company. I suggest you go and speak with the business owners to see if you can do a deal or two!

If you advertise your business then you must trial your adverts and test to see which ones work the best for you.

By trialling your adverts you should agree on a design and more importantly the content of your advert and run each one for around a month at a time. At the end of each month change the advert to a different design and/or different content and so on. When you are testing your adverts you must make sure you take your marketing calendar data into account too.

At then end of each trial make a note of how many enquiries each advert received and of those enquiries that went on to converted into clients. As you collate this data you will begin to build a picture of which adverts work the best for you and use the ones that produce the most responses.

You should look at advertising as an investment and, as with any investment, you want to get the best return from it. If you divide the cost of an advert by the number of enquiries this will give you the cost per enquiry – for example if an advert cost you £1,000 and you got 100 responses – each response cost you £10; However, if an advert that subsequently cost you £1,000 and produced 200 responses – your return on investment or ROI has been doubled and the cost per enquiry halved.

All businesses should have a marketing calendar!

So what is a marketing calendar?

During the course of the year you should track where your enquiries come from and which ones lead to customers. At the same time you should record which month the enquiries come in to your business so that you can build a picture of which months are your busiest and which ones are the least busy.

Once you have compiled this data you can put this into the form of a calendar and then use this to your businesses advantage. By knowing which months in the year you already get most enquiries; you can then plan further advertising in those months to really capitalise on the months in which your customers are looking to buy.

Secondly, you can look at the months where you are short of enquiries and look at complimentary products to shore up your business in those lean months.

You may be saying – but I do involve my employees in my business…but do you?

Of course your employees to do the work of the business and the employees, with the right direction, make any business great as it expands, but there are not many business owners that involve their employees in helping with important decisions.

I would suggest that you ask them their opinion on various expansion ideas or where you are looking at introducing new products or services get their input on this.

Also, ask them how to improve on customer service, especially those employees that are on the front line, as it were…as these are the ones that are dealing with the customers directly and are therefore likely to give you some of the best feedback.

Never be scared of getting the opinions of your employees and remember that most people work better with their own ideas than on ideas that have been forced upon them from a-high!

A good way of doing this is to have regular group meetings with your employees…if you are a small business then there is no reason why this could not involve all employees of the business, but you may have to do this after hours otherwise there will be no one to run the business whilst you are all in a meeting. I would suggest putting on some drinks and eats in the meeting and make it fun and enjoyable so that they all enjoy the experience…thereby you will get the best out of them.

If your business is a larger company with too many employees to meet in one sitting, consider breaking this up into smaller meetings and perhaps get someone to volunteer from each group meeting to come forward to meet together to discuss their individual ideas.

The benefit of this system is not only will it produce great ideas to take your business forward, but it will also help to make it more independent of you the business owner.

If you put yourself in the position of a customer for a moment – this will help you to recognise a good method of encouraging your own business customers to purchase from, especially for new customers for their first time!

You must have a favourite shop where you buy your clothes from in the high street or even on the Internet these days…and I would take a bet that one of your reasons for buying from this company, aside from the quality of the product etc. is for their returns policy.

This is their guarantee to you that if you are not totally satisfied with the item supplied, then you may return the item to the store. A good example of a company that does this kind of returns policy very well is Ikea, as they have a returns policy of 90-days, which is much higher than most and look at how successful this company is.

A guarantee works in the same way as this and can be as bold to say that…”if you are not totally satisfied with our product or service then you will not pay a single penny!” You might cringe at the thought of offering such a bold guarantee, but potential customers will certainly think long and hard about such a bold statement…they will think that you, as a company, must be so confident about your service or about your products to provide such a confident statement.

If your business does not already have some kind of guarantee then you should definitely consider introducing such a scheme…examples of guarantees:

- If you do not like our XYZ product or if you change your mind, bring it back in new condition and we will give you a full refund…no questions asked.

- If I do not show up within half an hour of our agreed meeting time you will not have to pay.

- If your delivery is not made on the next day we will pay you the price of your goods ordered plus £100.

I am sure that you will be able to make some of these up for yourself…the more outrageous the guarantee the more likely you will beat what the competition is doing and therefore stand out from the crowd!

P.s. If you work on the premise that the majority of people are honest your guarantee policy will only serve your business in a positive way thereby attracting customers andmore business, rather than to make you a loss…of course this is subject to your company delivering  a quality product and on time.