Sell My Café

1. Choose the Right Buyer

Many people frequent the same cafes regularly. They know what to expect and what they like. It becomes familiar and a part of their lives. You want to make sure those loyal customers are still satisfied with the operations after you’ve sold your business. Especially if the name and many of the employees are staying the same.

People are generally wary of changes and if they find they don’t like what has changed they will immediately feel negative towards the business as a whole. If you plan to keep some ownership or still benefit from the café, you’ll want to make certain that the new owner and operator will be the right fit and someone who understands how to run it.

2. Use The Resources You’ve Built

You’ve likely spent years establishing a network of people, either suppliers of goods, local people who frequent your café, or other business owners nearby. When in the process of selling your café, you should be utilizing this network to find potential buyers. You’d be surprised how often one of these connections will know the right person or know where to look.

There will always be someone more experienced than you with selling a business, most people don’t do this sort of thing often. Whether it’s recommendations for a broker, someone who can do some minor repairs for less cost, or even knowing someone who is looking to buy a café asking around could prove to be highly profitable.

3. Start Early, But Take Your Time

Once you’re sure you want to sell your café, you shouldn’t wait to start the process. Selling any business takes time and a café has a lot of small details that add to that time. The longer you wait, the more risk you run of something happening to lower your café’s worth or missing a more profitable market period. Likewise, you shouldn’t try to hurry the process.

Rushing creates more chance for a mistake to be made or detail overlooked. Some of these things can cause a large loss in potential profit. Take the time to make sure everything is in order.

4. Get All The Documents Ready

One of the more headache-inducing parts of buying and selling a business is all the paperwork and documents involved, but it’s a vital part of the process so gathering these documents and keeping them in one place is a great way to stay organized. Some of the more important papers to gather are:

• Commercial documents like registrations, insurance, and account information.
• Your financial details such as bank loans, profit and loss statements, and forecast financials are essential.
• Legal papers like franchise agreements if you have any, leases, legal guidelines, and contracts.
• Operational documents, including rosters, strategy plans, marketing information and materials, and supplier contact information and history.

You’ll also want to include your predictive documents. These would be things like your revenue growth and intellectual property.

5. Don’t Undersell Your Café

Maybe you’re in a rush to retire or you don’t think your little corner café is a big deal. Maybe someone offered a really low bid or came in and pointed out all the things that could be better. Often, business owners struggle with understanding how much their business is actually worth, and many will price it lower than it really should be.

What you need to remember is that you’ve put a lot of work into your café. With all the options out there, building this type of business isn’t easy. It’s a good idea to sit down and work through several aspects of your café to understand what it’s really worth.

• Net Value

Figuring out the net worth of your business is one of the easiest ways to get a base price. By simply subtracting the liabilities from the assets, you can get a starting number for how much your café should be. This is probably one of the most common ways a business owner can figure out a decent price for their business.

• Checking The Market

Another great way to get a base price that can then be built on is by looking at what other similar businesses nearby are going for. If you’re in a more populated area, you’ll likely be able to find other cafes up for sale and see what their asking amount is.

• ROI

Many business owners prefer to use the return on investment to set their asking price. This is a great way to highlight the future potential to your potential buyers looking into your business. It shows the future profit and creates a nice image for the future of the café.

• Future Potential

Speaking of the future potential of your café, taking into account the surrounding growth and development of the area your café is situated in is a way to increase the perceived value. Knowing they’re going to put up more housing or add a strip mall just across the street will change the face of the community and therefore provide more traffic into the café. Potential buyers will easily be able to see the future profit.

• Benefits of Location

Simply being positioned in an area that gets the right exposure and foot traffic already can also help boost your café’s worth. The planned development is nice and can help you get more profit when you sell, but already having access to a great location is even better. If you have a crowd of people who walk by it to work every day, or if there are a lot of other businesses close by that bring in more people, this will show the potential profit of the space.

• Be That Community Staple

We’ve already touched on how much cafes can integrate into a community. Cementing that connection to the area will also aid in finding good buyers. If they see popular social or entertainment events happening on a regular basis, they’ll know that your café is well-known and established in the area. It shows committed customers and the ability to easily draw in more people.

• Understand The Cost

Knowing how much it would cost someone to build up a café in the same way you have will allow you to see what a potential buyer might be thinking about. They considered the cost of starting from scratch, so if you know that cost as well you can see where they’re coming from easier and you’ll be able to point out the difference.

• Use Your Specialties

As with organizing events to prove your position in the community, having specialties will also create that sense of importance and necessity. Being the best place for pastries or having the most comfortable area for studying and working can actually go a long way in showing buyers the potential customer profit. This is especially true for those places with a completely unique flair or foods that are not available anywhere else nearby.

• Recognizing The Competition

Before any potential buyers have the chance to worry about any of your café’s competitors, you should address it and make sure those concerns are satisfied. If a buyer thinks there are too many similar establishments, they won’t buy. You need to show them that those competitors aren’t worth the worry.

• Talk Up Your People

If you plan on selling with employees included, make sure your buyers know how great they are at their jobs. If you have customers that come in every day or even every week, make sure to point out this consistency. Knowing that there is a regular customer base and an already well trained staff will show buyers an established and ready to operate a business.