You can not believe it! You decide to sell your business and the next day it seems that half the city knows you are trying to sell. What affect will that information have on your employees, vendors competitors and customers?

This is a real concern once you decide to sell. The next thing you know is that everyone in the free world knows their intentions. How does that happen and how can it be prevented?

In order to make the best possible decisions for your family, your company, and yourself, you must talk about your plans to sell with informed and experienced professionals. You need factual information about how the exit planning and sale or transfer processes work. You need expert guidance about whether your company is poised to command top dollar and information about market conditions for sales in your industries. And finally, you need help sorting through all of the emotional issues that surround the departure from your companies.

Experienced transaction advisors (attorneys, business brokers or investment bankers) provide the input you need on a confidential basis. Nothing that you discusses with the transaction advisor leaves the room without your express consent.

Information leaks seldom originate with your advisory team. They know the importance of confidentiality. They understand that a breach of confidentiality on their part will affect not just your business, but their reputations in the community.

The confidentiality problem then does not lie with your advisors. How then do you maintain confidentiality once the information-gathering process ends and the sale process begins?

A transaction intermediary (Business Broker or Investment Banker) will contact interested buyers and disseminate information about your company to parties known and unknown. They will safeguard your confidentiality, screen the potential buyer list and remove competitors or companies with whom you do business. Initial marketing efforts to potential purchasers do not identify your business by name. Finally, qualified buyers (of your un-named company) must sign a strong and binding confidentiality agreements before learning the identity of your business or any confidential information.

All of these safeguards are in place to protect you, the owner, from the consequences mentioned above: nervous customers, jumpy employees and opportunistic competitors. All the scrupulously maintained barriers in the world, however, cannot shield an owner from the most dangerous threat to confidentiality—the owner’s own mouth. In the few cases when confidentiality is breached, the leak generally originates with the owner. He or she just couldn’t maintain silence until the deal closed.

Let that be a warning to the loose-lipped. But let it also reassure the vast majority of owners: if you can control your own conversations, you can control the confidentiality of the entire sale process.

Contributed by Eric Nielsen, Sunbelt Business Advisors.

Sunbelt Business Advisors offer you unbiased information you need to know about Business Exit Planning.

Have something to add? Got a different point of view, want to play devil’s advocate, or just think we’re all wet? Post your experiences or examples.

Tags: advisor team, preserve business value, protecting business assets, sale of your business, third party sale, transaction team, transfer of business ownership