What makes a business unsellable — and how to fix it

What makes a business unsellable?

One question I get a lot is, do you think my business is sellable?

I love this conversation because, in most cases, yes, you CAN sell the business. You may have to tweak some things to make it appealing, but as a baseline, most businesses CAN be sold.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard about a business owner who just closed the doors to their company because they didn’t even realize selling was a possibility. 

One of my big goals with They Got Acquired is to prevent this from happening. I want to help founders realize that YES, selling your business is an opportunity, and the earlier you think about it, the more options you’ll have.

So it’s really my preference to come at this topic with the assumption that your business is sellable, though you might have to make some changes to really get there. I find that’s more productive than assuming, as a default, that the business is NOT sellable.

But there are a few characteristics of businesses that can make them unsellable. And that’s what we’re discussing today.

All of the characteristics I’m going to describe here are fixable, but sometimes they take a lot of effort to change. So often the real question is, can I change this in a meaningful way, and do I want to put in the effort to get there?

So first – to sell your business, you must have profit. It is VERY difficult to sell a company that does not have EBITDA or SDE, that’s seller’s discretionary earnings.

It doesn’t matter whether you have a million in revenue, $10 million in revenue or $250,000 in revenue. If you don’t have profit, it will be very hard to sell the business.

Now, there are some exceptions to this rule. Occasionally you’ll hear about a huge, VC-backed company that sold before it became profitable. I blame those stories for making us think profit doesn’t matter. And sometimes even we write about smaller, bootstrapped companies that were acquired before they were making real money. 

I think of Viral Post Generator, which sold when it had only been live for one week. It was a quiz software that went viral, attracting 10,000 users a day. So a company that wanted that same audience quickly swooped in and bought it before the founder even had a chance to monetize. Cool story.

But these exceptions are incredibly rare. They usually happen when a strategic buyer approaches the seller because they see a lucrative way to integrate one business into the other. 

That gives the seller a ton of leverage, because the buyer is really motivated to buy, and so they might offer a great price even though the business isn’t profitable.

But it’s far less likely for those pieces to fall into place when you take your company to market and look for buyers. 

Most buyers simply want cash flow – just like you do, as the owner. 

So what about business size? How much revenue and profit do you need to be sellable?

The answer is really, you can sell at ANY size. But HOW you sell and WHO you sell to, changes based on the size of your business.

For example, if you’re bringing in $100,000 in profit, you can probably sell that business, but you’ll have to do it on your own, by pitching buyers directly, or through a marketplace that sells smaller companies. Most brokers and advisors won’t sell businesses that small.

And as a business gets bigger, more doors open in terms of who might buy it. 

SaaS businesses, for example, are hot no matter the size, but once you reach around $2M in annual recurring revenue, that’s when private equity firms start to get interested. That type of buyer is typically out of reach for smaller companies.

OK, let’s move onto the second factor that could impact your ability to sell the business. This is founder dependency. 

If you’re a one-person consulting firm or a freelance writer, for example, it doesn’t really matter how much money you bring in, it will be difficult to sell your business. When the business revolves around one person, a buyer would really be buying that person and their work, rather than the business itself

And sometimes this happens. When a buyer acquires a company for its leaders, for the team, or even for an individual, it’s called an acqui-hire. That team goes in-house with the buyer to help them achieve their goals, which might be completely different than what the seller company did. 

I experienced this myself, when I sold my boutique content marketing agency through an acqui-hire in 2015. I went in-house with the buyer, alongside several members of my team… And you can hear more about my experience in Episode 3 of Season 1.

If your business is entirely reliant on you, you might be able to use your success to buy yourself a job, and you’re in a good position to negotiate more for that job than you would have if you didn’t run the business. 

But it’s unlikely you’ll sell the business and actually exit at the same time. You’ll need to stay on with the buyer to get your payout.

OK, the third factor I want to mention is rare, but it does happen.

Sometimes, there are simply no buyers who end up being a good fit for what you’ve created.

How could this be possible?

Well, if you’re in a niche where there are no companies that are bigger than you, or not many companies that want to reach the same type of customer that you serve, or if your niche is simply not appealing for some reason… you might have trouble finding a buyer, or at least a buyer who will pay the price you want.

I can think of one good example here, of a founder who built a B2C SaaS. It was honestly a great business on so many fronts, but it was B2C, in other words, they served consumers rather than businesses. And when he took it to market, he found that most SaaS buyers really want B2B enterprise SaaS. There just weren’t many parties that were interested in his niche.

This founder did get an offer or two, but they just weren’t the strong offers he’d hoped for. Which put him in the difficult position of having to decide whether to sell for less than he’d hoped, or to continue running the business instead. He chose to keep running the business.

This example is a great segway into the final characteristic that makes a business unsellable.

This one is quite common, and, ironically, also in your control.

The fourth reason why some businesses are unsellable — is because the founder’s expectations around sale price are unrealistic.

There is often a gulf between what sellers think they should get for their business and what buyers are willing to pay.

It’s natural to want to feel well compensated for a business you’ve put your sweat and tears and YEARS into. 

But buyers don’t care how much effort you put into building your business. And so all that matters at the end of the day, is what the market will pay for it.

And as we discussed, while lots of factors go into valuations, they are heavily dependent on the business’ profit. If you don’t have profit that backs up your ideal sale price, it will be difficult or impossible to find a buyer to pay it.

This difference in expectations between buyers and sellers is probably always around, but it’s been exacerbated by some of the crazy high sale multiples we saw in 2022, 2021, and 2022. 

Even now, in 2025, that pandemic time is three years behind us, but founders still sometimes expect to see those kinds of multiples. Our expectations got inflated, and for some of us, they never returned to earth, even though what buyers are willing to pay has normalized, and is drastically lower than it was a few years ago.

If your expectations for sale price are out of whack, this makes it really hard to sell the business — and this applies no matter how great your company is.

That’s why it’s always smart to get a ballpark valuation early, so you know where you’re at. Then, if you have an ideal sale price you’re shooting for, you better understand where you need to get the business to command that price.

Too many founders pick a target sale price based not on the performance of their business, but on how much they need to retire, or how much they want to pay back investors, or simply what feels good to them.

But it’s way smarter to see how the market actually values your business, and then work on it from there. 

We offer a free valuation calculator at TheyGotAcquired.com/valuation. 

It’s super quick, and it will only give you a ballpark idea of how much your business might be worth – no one can do a comprehensive valuation in 30 seconds – but it can be helpful as a benchmark… and then you can move forward from there.

So that’s it, those are the four things that can make your business unsellable: not having profit, when the business relies heavily on the owner, when there’s no buyer for your niche, and – the biggie – when your expectations around sale price are too high.

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.