Are you considering selling your marketing/advertising agency? There are a lot of different types of marketing and advertising agencies. Some deal exclusively in digital advertising and others combine print ads with digital ads. Some are involved in developing websites and branding, and others are involved in promotional products, direct marketing, communications, or telemarketing. And some handle all aspects of marketing. There could be different potential buyers depending on your area of expertise.
You may have questions such as: How much will my marketing company sell for? How do I determine an asking price? Who do I find potential buyers for my advertising agency?
Synergy Business Brokers has been selling advertising and marketing companies for a long time and can answer your questions and assist you with the process of selling your business so that you can focus on running it during the sale process.
Synergy Business Brokers will meet with you and find out more about your business and how we can best position it for a potential buyer. We will review your last three years of financial information and a current year to date Profit and loss statement, to determine how much you are making including your salary, perks, benefits, and profits. We will ask you about your customers, employees, areas of expertise, and growth opportunities as well as challenges. We’ll want to understand your motivation for selling and find out if you wish to stay on with the company after the sale for a while or would prefer a brief transition period. Then based on the information and what similar marketing/advertising agencies sell for we’ll provide you with a possible asking price.
If you would like to move forward, we’ll start developing an overview document that we will use to market your business. The overview document will be designed to provide enough information to get potential buyers interested, but not enough, so they know which advertising business is for sale. We’ll advertise the overview on many different websites, some of which get over 1 million users/month. Also, we will market your business to our database of over 40,000 potential buyers that we’ve built up over 15 years. We will also contact other advertising/marketing agencies that are looking to expand and acquire other marketing firms. Also, we’ll contact private equity groups and wealthy investors. It’s important to keep an open mind on which buyer might be best for your business because we have found that the best offer may or may not come from another company within the marketing industry.
Before we provide details on your company, we will have potential buyers sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and provide us with information on their qualifications. Once we have a qualified buyer that is interested in moving forward, we will typically set up a meeting or initial phone call. On average it takes 1-8 weeks to introduce this first buyer and 1 to 6 buyers that we present to sell your marketing business. From start to finish the typical sale time is about 6-9 months, but of course, this can vary depending on the details.
The best way to get the full price for your business is to have multiple buyers competing for your business with various offers. We can help with this process to help you identify which buyers and proposals would be best for you given the differences in the total price, the structure of the deal, requirements for a transition period, chemistry with a given buyer, etc. Once you decide to accept an offer, then we will move to due diligence with the buyer requesting more information. The final steps are negotiating a purchase and sale agreement and closing the deal.
If you’re in NY, NJ, CT, MA, PA or anywhere on the East Coast and beyond and are looking to sell a marketing company with annual revenues between $700,000 and $30 million; we are here to help you. Email us at info@synergybb.com, fill out and submit our secure online form or give us a call at 888-750-5950, and we’ll set up a private consultation to get started.