A practice comes available. Maybe a broker calls, maybe a guy you know mentions that so-and-so is finally hanging it up, and just like that there’s a real book in front of you for the taking. The feeling that hits first is excitement. You’ve been wanting to grow by buying, and here it is, dropped in your lap. That feeling is the problem. The first emotion you should feel when a deal lands easily isn’t excitement. It’s suspicion.
I don’t mean be paranoid. I mean be honest about how this market actually works. The genuinely good books, the clean ones with loyal clients and steady revenue, mostly don’t make it to you. They get handed to a junior who’s been groomed for years. They get bought quietly by a firm the owner already trusts, before anyone else hears a word. The great practices get spoken for in the dark. So when one shows up in the daylight, available, being shopped, eager, that availability is itself a piece of information. It’s telling you something. The question is whether you’ll listen or just reach for it.
Availability is information
Think about what it means for a book to be openly available for sale. The owner either couldn’t find a successor inside his own shop, or didn’t build one, or the obvious buyers looked and passed. None of those are automatically deal-killers. Plenty of fine practices are for sale for ordinary reasons, the owner’s tired, his health changed, there’s nobody in the family who wants it. But every one of those ordinary reasons sits right next to a worse one, and the pitch is built to show you the ordinary one and keep the worse one off the table.
So before you fall in love, sit with the uncomfortable version. What if the revenue is already quietly sliding, the clients are aging out and the assets are starting to leave, and the owner is getting out now, before it shows up in a number you’d see? What if the relationships you think you’re buying actually belong to him, the person, and the day he’s gone the clients have no reason to stay? What if it’s been shopped to six other buyers who all found the same thing you haven’t looked for yet, and now it’s being dressed up a little nicer for you?
The pitch is designed to skip the question
Here’s the careful consideration, a seller and a broker are not lying to you, usually. They’re just doing what anyone selling anything does, which is lead with the good and let you not ask about the rest. The pitch will be the loyal clients, the nice average account size, the decades of history. What it won’t volunteer is the client who’s a third of the revenue and already has one foot out the door, or the fact that half the book is in one industry that’s been shrinking for ten years, or that the owner’s been coasting for the last five and the service has quietly gone stale.
So ask it. Out loud, to yourself, before anything else. Why is this actually for sale, and why is it available to me? Then go do the digging the seller is quietly hoping you’ll skip.
The questions nobody asks out loud are exactly what The Chairman’s Council is for. Paid members get the full playbook, and every one after it.
One deal you walk away from can be worth more than one you win. Upgrade and read how.
