Selling Your Laundromat How to Get Started pt 2 of 2

 

Once you have a general idea of what you want to charge for your store, and if you want to be a landlord and continue to own the property, the next question you have to decide is whether or not you wanna work with some sort of business broker or if you want to try selling your store yourself. As someone that has gone down both roads, working with a broker can make your life easier because you’re not dealing with all of the ticky tack phone calls and emails, plus you usually will have the ability to look over legal documents and access to a lawyer if you do not already have one. Your broker will usually have a list of websites where you can list your laundromat for sale. You can also set these up and advertise on your own. If you decide to sell your store yourself.

The trick with working with a broker is they want their commission. Some brokers take a percentage of the sale, some brokers are a flat percentage or dollar fee. If you have a small store, the price that you’re trying to sell your store at might not make sense for you to give up that much money for someone to help you sell. If your store is doing $100,000 in topline revenue , but you have a broker that automatically wants $20,000 to sell your store, is it worth it forgetting $20,000 worth of profit to not handle phone calls and emails? 

No matter how you decide to sell your store and what method you use to evaluate your store, there are four things that you definitely want to have ready before you even put your store on the market:
Number one is to make sure your distributor knows that you are selling and what the general details are, price while you’re selling, how you’re evaluating your store, property included or no, etc. 
Your distributor usually has some people that they are working with that are interested in buying a store. If you could be patient and don’t need to sell right away, let your distributor help you with leads.

The second is to decide if you want to seller finance your store. This can be a quick way to get a sale and usually you get a little higher price, however it will attract a lot of buyers that don't have the money and when something goes down they can't fix it. Not long afterwards you might be holding onto your store again because the new buyers didn't know what they were doing and ran your business into the ground or stripped all the cash out of it and left you with al the unpaid bills. I recommend you don't follow the self finance route unless the person you are selling to is someone that is already in the industry and works laundromats.

The third thing you need to do is make sure you have proof of whatever you are claiming your topline revenue or your net profit is. That might be in the form of tax returns or collection, sheets, or both. You might even keep track of the cycle counts on your machines. Whatever data you have, you’ll need to provide that to the buyer or whomever they are financing through usually.

The last thing that you want to do is make sure you have your own numbers set to go. What things do you need to pay off when you sell the laundromat  that are related to the laundry business so that you can walk away with the maximum amount of profit. What is your rock-bottom price? What are some factors in a buyer that will lead you to either saying yes or no to working with them, for example, will you work with buyers that are only looking for a land contract or buyers that are looking to get into the business for the first time  or buyers that may be are out of state. If you know who you’re willing to work with as a potential prospect for buying your store, you will then have an easier time sorting through potential leads.

Selling your Laundromat can be a tough thing. Like anything else in life, you are moving on to something else. Losing that store is in very parallel way, like losing a loved one. You put a lot of money and sweat equity into the business, and suddenly you won’t have that anymore. Take some time to grieve that loss as you sit on your chaise lounge with a nice rum drink in your hand on a beach somewhere, relaxing and letting the ocean breeze strip the smell of years of dryer sheets off of your skin and out of your pores.

To read part 1 click on the link:
Selling-your-laundromat-how-to-get started

Ev
A Heck of A Nice Guy