How to Automate BizBuySell

A business for sale is a secret with a price on it

The laundromat, the eleven-van HVAC company, the two-location restaurant group, the accounting practice whose owner is sixty-eight: BizBuySell is where businesses like those get put up for sale. It has been part of CoStar Group since 2012 and sits at the centre of a network that also takes in BizQuest, LoopNet and FindaFranchise.

Three sets of people meet there. Owners who want out and mostly cannot say so out loud. Buyers, who range from a search fund with a mandate to a man who has decided he is done with corporate life. And business brokers, hired by the first group and spending their days sorting the second.

The whole thing runs under one awkward constraint. A sale is usually confidential. Staff do not know, customers do not know, and a competitor finding out can cost the seller the deal. So the listing is deliberately vague, and the real story only comes out after somebody signs.

Most inquiries are not buyers, and sorting them takes a fortnight

A listing goes live and the inquiries start arriving. That sounds like the good part.

Some are competitors. Some are other brokers. Plenty are people who will never sign anything, and telling them apart means working through each one: send the agreement, wait, chase it, release the memorandum once it comes back, then watch who actually opens it. Meanwhile the genuine buyer who wrote at eleven on Sunday night is still waiting, and every hour of silence cools the next reply.

Behind the inquiries sits the deal. The seller has not sent the last three years of returns, without which nothing can be priced. Diligence has a date on it. The buyer said his lender was comfortable and nobody has seen a prequalification letter. The listing has been up four months at a price that made sense in the spring.

Then multiply all of that by every listing a broker is carrying at once.

BizBuySell

Sunday night inquiries answered Monday morning Overnight messages sorted before nine, with the ones that came with a real question separated from the clicks that came with nothing.

The NDA that never came back Every buyer sent one, listed by how many days it has been, next to the ones who signed, took the memorandum and then went silent.

The first reply is still yours Lists get built and replies get drafted. A first conversation with a possible buyer goes out over the broker's own name, every time.

BrokerWorks runs the listing across the whole network

The marketplace half of the job is genuinely solved, and a broker paying for it should be using all of it.

BrokerWorks is the subscription brokers list on, putting several businesses up at once and managing them across the network sites, with messaging between broker and seller kept in one place. Seller Leads sits on top of it: an owner describes the business, gets matched with participating brokers, and stays anonymous until they decide to share who they are. Listings run as Basic, Showcase or Diamond ads, the enhanced ones adding size, position, video and attachments plus an email blast to buyers who asked to hear about businesses like this one. On the buying side, saved searches are scanned daily and matches arrive by email, and a valuation report gives an owner somewhere to start.

All of that gets a listing seen and delivers the inquiries to the right inbox.

What sits outside it is everything after the inquiry. The signed agreement lives in an e-signature tool. The financials are in the seller's accountant's outbox. The prequalification is at a lender. The competing listings are on other marketplaces at prices that move weekly. Each one is a separate login holding a fact the broker needs today.

Stale prices and silent buyers belong on one page

A broker's Monday is mostly looking things up in other people's systems.

Overnight inquiries pulled into one list before nine, with the ones that came with a real question marked out from the ones that came with a click. Agreements that went out and never came back, listed by buyer and by how many days it has been. Buyers who signed, received the memorandum and then went quiet, which is the most useful list a broker never has time to build.

Then the listing itself. The same business checked on every marketplace it appears on, so a price cut in one place is not still stale in another. Comparable listings in the same trade and county read for what they are asking now, which is the conversation to have before a seller decides to hold out for spring. Diligence and closing dates counted down. The seller still owing three years of returns, chased on a schedule instead of when it becomes an emergency.

None of that calls for judgement about a buyer. It calls for somebody to look, every morning, in eleven different places.

The buyer who is real still gets a person

Every one of those checks is ten minutes, and a broker carrying forty listings has a whole morning of them before the first phone call.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens BizBuySell, the e-signature tool, the other marketplaces and the lender's portal, reads how far each buyer and each listing has got, and hands back one page: who is new, who has stalled, what is due this week.

Replies are drafted rather than sent. A first conversation with somebody who might buy your client's business is the entire job, and it goes out over the broker's own name.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.