What It Actually Takes to Sell Your Business Yourself

Not every business needs a broker. I’ll say that out loud, even though selling businesses is how I pay my mortgage.

Some deals are too small for a broker’s fee to make sense for either side. Some owners have the time, the temperament, and their paperwork already in decent shape, and they’d rather keep the commission in their own pocket. Both are good reasons to go it alone.

So here’s roughly how I’d do it if it were my business, and no one was holding the other end of the rope.

None of what follows is financial advice, and it’s high level on purpose. Think of it as the shape of the work, not a checklist you can run with your eyes closed. When a number gets big or a clause gets strange, you’ll want a real accountant and a real lawyer in the room. I’ll point out where.

Step 1. Clean up your numbers so they tell the truth

Before you can price anything, you have to know what your business actually earns. Not what your tax return says. What it earns.

Most owners run their books to pay as little tax as legally possible. That’s a smart way to own a business. It works against you the day you sell, because your financials are busy hiding the very profit a buyer is trying to see.

The fix is called normalizing, or recasting. You add back the expenses that are really owner benefits or one-time events. Your own above-market salary. The truck that’s in the company name but sits in your driveway. The personal phone, the conference in Hawaii, the one-off legal bill from that lawsuit last year. Add those back and a truer picture of the profit appears.

One rule. Only add back things you can defend. A buyer’s accountant will test every line, and the fastest way to lose someone’s trust is an add-back you can’t explain with a straight face.

This is also the moment to get a good accountant involved. In Canada, the Lifetime Capital Gains Exemption, or LCGE, can shelter a large chunk of the gain when you sell, but only if your company qualifies as a qualified small business corporation, a QSBC. That depends on how you’re structured, and sorting it out the week before closing is like packing your bags after the flight has already boarded. Have that conversation early.

Step 2. Figure out what you’re actually living on: SDE and EBITDA

Once the numbers are honest, you land on one of two profit figures.

SDE stands for seller’s discretionary earnings. It’s your normalized profit plus the salary and perks a single owner-operator takes out of the business. It answers a simple question. What would this business put in one owner’s pocket in a year? For most small, owner-run companies, that’s the number that matters.

EBITDA stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It shows what the operation earns on its own, once you’ve paid someone a fair wage to do your job. Bigger businesses with a real management team get valued on EBITDA, because the owner isn’t the one turning the wrench.

Small and owner-run, think SDE. Larger with a team running it day to day, think EBITDA. The line between them is fuzzy, and that’s fine.

Step 3. Turn that number into a price

Buyers don’t pay for a year of profit. They pay for a stream of it. So the rough price of a business is its SDE or EBITDA times a multiple, and that multiple moves with the industry, the size, the growth, and how risky the whole thing looks once you leave.

For a small business, a multiple is a starting point, not a verdict. Two companies with identical profit can be worth very different amounts depending on how much of the value walks out the door with the owner. Treat any number you calculate as a direction, not a destination.

You can sniff out rough ranges from the listing sites, from industry reports, and from asking people who’ve sold in your space. Just remember that asking prices are asking prices. What a business lists for and what it sells for are often two different stories.

Step 4. Build your two documents: a teaser and a CIM

Selling a business runs on two pieces of writing, and they do different jobs.

The first is a blind teaser. It’s a short pitch, a paragraph or a page, that sells the opportunity without naming the business. It says what the business does, roughly where it is, the size of the revenue and earnings, and why someone would want it. What it never includes is anything that lets your staff, your customers, or your competitors figure out it’s you. The teaser’s job is to make a good buyer lean in.

The second is the confidential information memorandum, or CIM. It’s the fuller document a serious buyer reviews once they’ve signed an NDA. It tells the real story. How the business makes money, the normalized financials, who the customers are, who’s on the team, what transfers when you leave and what doesn’t, where the growth is, and why you’re selling. The CIM’s job is to keep a good buyer leaning in once they can see the whole thing.

This is where AI earns its keep. Use it to draft the CIM, to build a clean, professional presentation, and, maybe most usefully, to catch what you’ve left out. Ask it what a buyer in your industry would expect to see and where your document looks thin. It’s a decent stand-in for a second set of eyes at two in the morning. Just verify what it tells you, keep sensitive financials out of tools you don’t trust, and remember it won’t read a buyer’s face across a table. That part’s still yours.

Step 5. List where Canadian buyers are watching

Canada has real marketplaces where real buyers look every day. BusinessesForSale.com runs a busy Canadian section. BizBuySell and BizQuest both carry Canadian listings. BusinessSellCanada.com is built for for-sale-by-owner sellers here, and Business Exchange is another homegrown one.

Serious buyers, search funds, and people looking to buy themselves a job all monitor these. The teaser is what goes public. Nothing that identifies you, nothing confidential, just enough to make the right person get in touch.

Step 6. When a buyer reaches out, control the order

The phone starts ringing, and the order matters.

Do not send your financials to the first person who emails. Get an NDA signed first. That’s a non-disclosure agreement, and it’s the gate that has to close before anything confidential goes out. Once it’s signed, you send the CIM. Once they’ve read the CIM, you start the real conversation. NDA, then CIM, then talk. In that order. Every time.

A serious buyer won’t blink at signing an NDA, because it’s completely standard. Someone who balks at a basic confidentiality agreement is telling you something about how the rest of the deal will go.

Step 7. Get a lawyer, and get help wherever you need it

This one isn’t optional, broker or no broker. Get a lawyer who has actually done mergers and acquisitions. Not the one who handled your house purchase. Someone who’s papered business sales before, because the purchase agreement, the reps and warranties, and the way the money actually changes hands are where a good lawyer earns their fee. This is genuinely make-or-break.

Encourage your buyer to get proper representation too, ideally someone who knows the industry. A deal where both sides are well advised closes a lot cleaner than one where somebody’s flying blind and getting nervous. And watch for this. If anyone, buyer or seller, drags their feet on getting a lawyer, pay attention. A serious party wants the deal done right. Someone avoiding a lawyer is either short on money, hiding something, or not really buying.

You don’t have to carry the rest alone either. Anywhere in this list where you feel out of your depth, you can hire that one piece out. An appraiser for a proper valuation. A writer for the marketing materials. And a lot of brokers, me included, will work fee-for-service. If full representation isn’t the right fit, or the budget’s tight, plenty of us will take on a single piece on a bespoke basis. You buy the expensive expertise where you need it most and keep the rest yourself.

The hardest part isn’t on the list

Everything above is learnable. The genuinely hard part is something no step can hand you. It’s looking at your own business the way a stranger would.

You built this. You know which ugly parts don’t actually matter and which quiet strengths do. A buyer knows none of that. They’re about to spend their savings on something they can’t fully see yet, so they show up skeptical, and that skepticism can feel personal fast.

This is one of the quieter jobs a broker does. Not the listing, not the paperwork. The emotional distance. A broker can hear a lowball offer and not flinch, because it isn’t their life’s work sitting on the table.

Without one, you have to build that distance yourself. The best way I know is to actually sit in the buyer’s chair. If you were walking into this business cold, what would you want to know? What would worry you? What would you poke at first? If the honest answer is that everything depends on you, or that your biggest customer is a handshake deal, or that the books are a bit of a mess, those are your roadblocks. Far better you find them now than have a buyer find them halfway through due diligence.

From your side, the questions can feel like an interrogation over something you built with your own hands. From theirs, they’re just trying not to buy a problem. Both are true at once, and the whole sale lives in the space between them.

Selling it yourself is absolutely doable. The hard part was never the paperwork. It’s looking at what you built the way a buyer will, and being honest about what you see.