Selling your business is a different kind of business.

October 15, 2026

By Max Beairsto

By the time I understood what it took to sell a business well, my dad’s sale was years behind us. Hindsight is an excellent qualification with a terrible sense of timing.

Dad was a master electrician. His company served the oilfield as both an electrical contractor and a general maintenance contractor. When he sold, he relied only on his accountant’s advice. He did not realize the full value of what he had built.

I was in high school and completely oblivious. I would like a more impressive role in this story, but I am trying to keep it non-fiction.

As I learned about owning, valuing and selling businesses, I began to understand what I had missed. Dad’s experience became one of the reasons I got into helping owners with their exits and succession plans.

I have to resist the urge to turn his experience into a lecture about what he should have done. He built the company. I have the advantage of studying the sale after the fact, so a little humility seems appropriate.

The lesson I take from his sale isn’t that he needed to become a better businessman. It’s that running a contracting company and selling one are two different jobs. Being very good at the first doesn’t automatically qualify you for the second.

Contractors understand this perfectly when it comes to everyone else’s work. Somehow, once we own the business, we start thinking we ought to be able to figure out absolutely everything.

Would you buy the business you are selling?

Try looking at a sale from the other side of the table.

Suppose you are considering buying a contracting company. It has a good name, plenty of work and reasonable profits. Then the seller mentions that the estimator is leaving…So is the person who manages the best customer relationships… and the one who schedules the crews and sorts out jobs when they go sideways.

You would have questions. At least one might not be suitable for print, not even the acronym.

Now suppose those people are just one person. The owner. And they want to be gone by Christmas.

You can see the problem when it is somebody else’s company. It is harder when you have spent years being proud that customers ask for you, employees trust your judgement and nothing important happens without your involvement.

Those are real achievements. They can also make a business harder to hand over. A buyer needs to understand who will do the work and keep the relationships intact after you leave.

There is an emotional catch, too. We want a business that can run without us. We would just prefer people not demonstrate too much enthusiasm for the idea!

Being needed feels good. Teaching other people to be needed instead can feel surprisingly bad. But if customers trust only you, or a good foreperson still needs your approval for every decision, your retirement plan has a staffing problem.

Start sharing the relationships while you are still there. Give somebody the training and authority to handle a recurring responsibility. Let them do it differently from you, provided they do it well. Otherwise, you haven’t delegated. You have hired someone to hold the phone while you give instructions.

This isn’t about making yourself irrelevant. It is about making your departure survivable.

You see the years. The buyer sees next year.

An owner looks at a company and sees what it took to build it. A buyer looks at it and asks what it will earn next.

Neither perspective is unreasonable. They just aren’t the same conversation.

That can sting. The evenings, the risks, the jobs you rescued and the years you put into the place matter deeply to you. They don’t automatically produce a price somebody else can afford or justify. To support the price, you need evidence of earnings the next owner can reasonably expect to continue.

For a simple, hypothetical example, imagine the business reports $300,000 in annual earnings after paying you $60,000. If replacing the work you do would cost $140,000 in total annual compensation, adjusted earnings fall to $220,000, with everything else unchanged.

That missing $80,000 hasn’t been stolen by a pessimistic accountant. It is the cost of someone doing the work after you stop doing it. A hands-on purchaser may do some of it personally, but pay for their work and a return on their investment are different things.

Your willingness to work evenings for free does not automatically transfer with the tools and trucks.

The same scrutiny applies to the jobs on the books. Being booked solid sounds wonderful until someone asks whether you priced the work properly. A buyer needs to see the contract value, approved changes, costs so far, realistic cost to finish and expected margin. Those job records should agree with the accounts.

“We’ll sort out the extras with the customer later” is not the reassuring sentence an owner sometimes thinks it is.

Keep disputed extras separate from approved work. Remember that a deposit may come with unfinished obligations, and an unpaid invoice cannot fund Friday’s payroll. The next owner needs enough working capital to finish the jobs, not just enough money to buy the company.

None of this means you have built a bad business. It means there is a difference between knowing it makes money and being able to show someone else how it will make money without you.

Give the sale a proper scope of work

Dad relied on his accountant. I don’t tell that part of the story to take a swipe at accountants. Good accounting and tax advice matter enormously, and some accountants have extensive experience buying and selling businesses.

The question is what everyone has actually been asked to do.

Spell out who will assess value, find suitable buyers, negotiate the commercial terms and handle the tax, legal and transition work. Don’t assume those jobs are covered simply because your annual accounts are in good hands.

You don’t necessarily need a boardroom full of advisers. You need to know which jobs are covered and which aren’t. “I thought you were looking after that” is expensive enough on a building site. It is not something you want to hear halfway through selling the company.

Then give yourself time to act on the answers. Not the month after you have decided you cannot stand another winter, another difficult customer or another conversation about where somebody left the keys.

Years before you intend to leave is the useful time to find out where the weaknesses are. You can improve the records, spread customer relationships, develop people and show that the changes actually work. A valuation is a starting point for that work, not a promise of a particular sale price.

There is no need to turn this into another project you feel guilty about not finishing. Start with something small enough to do this week: write down every question or decision that only you can handle. Pick one recurring item. Work out who could take it on, what they need to learn and what authority they will need.

Book a separate conversation with your advisers about the sale itself. Not the year-end. Not next month’s cash requirements. The sale. Ask what would worry a buyer today and what you have time to change.

You might ultimately sell to another operator, transfer to family, arrange an employee buyout or keep a company that needs less of you. Preparation gives those choices a better chance. It does not oblige you to hand over the keys.

The part I can’t go back and fix

I wish I had understood all this when Dad sold. Not because a high-school kid should have been running the transaction. Nobody needed that.

I wish I had understood the size of the moment. He was selling something he had built, and I had no idea how much there was to get right.

Now I do. That is why his experience has stayed with me.

There is no insult in admitting that you need help with a job outside your trade. There is also no prize for reaching the end of a business sale having proved you could do everything yourself.

Dad knew his trade. I wish he had had more help with that last one.