Exit Planning Techniques By Market
Selling a Fine Dining Restaurant
You've invested time, effort, and creativity into building your fine dining restaurant. To see your ownership role through to completion, you will need to exhibit similar diligence in selling your company.
Personal and professional concerns surround the sale of a fine dining restaurant. In our experience, a common owner concern is how the sale will affect customers and employees.
There is no simple way to sell a business. But the most prepared fine dining restaurant sellers are achieving fair market value and more for their companies through persistence and the application of sound selling techniques.
After the Sale
Due diligence has ended and you're ready to close on the sale of your fine dining restaurant. All that stands between you and the sale proceeds is a few signatures, right? Not so fast. There are several details that still need to be addressed. What will the ownership transition look like? Are you prepared to deal with the tax consequences of receiving a significant sum of money in exchange for your business? How will you prepare your employees for your inevitable exit from the business? Ideally, these and other post-sale details should be addressed early on. But if you haven't dealt with them yet, it's important to have a frank conversation with the buyer, your broker and other professionals as soon as possible.
Finding Prospects
Many sellers don't realize how many prospective buyers there are for their businesses. Although some fine dining restaurant sellers advertise their businesses in general classifieds, the most successful sales are those in which professional brokers seek out likely buyers. Competitors may seem like natural prospects and they are. The downside is that they won't pay top dollar and will probably absorb your company into their own.
Finding Fine Dining Restaurant Buyers
It's difficult to predict where the buyer of your fine dining restaurant will come from. To cover all your bases, you'll need to conduct a broad buyer search process. That means listing your fine dining restaurant in trade-specific directories as well as general business-for-sale databases. Sellers should also recognize the value of promoting their sale in trusted business networks, carefully balancing the need for confidentiality with the promotional potential of their contact base.
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