A business is only as good as its capacity to sell. For first-time business owners, selling your business can be quite difficult. Fortunately, David Barnett has the answers for you. David is a professional consultant and bestselling author. He talks about everything you need to know to sell your business, from why it is important to how to do it. He asks us to look at our businesses as assets, meaning that it should be generating us income. He goes deeper into explaining the transitions people often take from being hired to creating a job. David says if we have a business goal we want to achieve, we should start with the end in mind.

Listen to the podcast here:

David Barnett on Selling Your Business The Right Way

I know many of you are curious about selling your businesses. We've talked about this but I’ve never been able to get a great expert to share their knowledge. I have with me, David Barnett. He's been valuing businesses since 2008. He's been a certified machinery and equipment appraiser since 2009. He was the first person in his market to earn the Certified Business Intermediary designation from the International Business Brokers Association in 2009. He's worked with clients on the transactions and that led him to the field to preparing businesses for sale and helping owners maximize value.

In 2014, he formalized a process to help small and medium-sized businesses systematize their operations, formalize their organizations in bite-sized steps that required minimal disruption of operations. His first book came out in 2014, Invest Local, was an Amazon bestseller. In 2015, Franchise Warnings, and what I invited him to talk about is 2016, How To Sell My Own Business. All of his books have achieved top selling spots in Amazon. I know David's busy. He does all kinds of things, engaging workshops, and small business acquisition. He's got a YouTube Channel and blog. David, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us on Heartrepreneur Radio.

Thanks for inviting me, Terri. It’s great to be with you.

Thank you. How did you and why did you resonate with the whole concept of selling businesses? How did that show up for you?

It started in a previous career. I owned a business where I was brokering debt solutions for small business owners. People were coming to me looking for ways to get money to either start or expand their business. Increasingly, people were coming to me to look for money to buy businesses. What I noticed is that there was a real lack of expertise in my market to help people do this properly. I saw all sorts of poorly-structured deals and intermediaries that had no idea what they were doing when it came to buying and selling businesses. I ended up jumping into the field and I became a business broker. I was in that industry from the end of 2008 until the end of 2011. I ended up leaving that business model behind me. Now, what I do is I work with people all around the world to help them sell their own business instead of being a broker.

The reason I'm stoked about this is very often, I talk to business owners of all kinds of businesses and they don't have an endgame. Some of them went into business without an endgame, but a lot of them are getting older.