: tools & methods for small businesses

BizTrader -dot- com  ( http://biztrader.com ) is something worth checking out.  (for an audio interview with its founder, see http://www.askjim.biz/embed/skin.php?filename=20080528-A )

Here’s a startup that allows anyone to post Businesses-for-Sale with as much, or as little, specificity as the owners want.

And once there’s interest, potential buyers and sellers contact each other (offline), and BizTrader’s role is done.  At that point, local business brokers add their technical and business expertise to help create the business sale and transfer.

Business Brokers should see the increase in these online marketplaces as a way to create new business.

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addendum:  Saturday 2 august 2008

There’s an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle – it has to do with the Real Estate industry’s caution (to the point of vitriol) at moving property listings from being in-house sources of proprietary data to, like so many things these days, public information.

Business Brokerage could fall into the same hand-wringing condemnation of ‘just anyone’ describing companies being sold.  If the past is any indication of what could happen with our industry, increased information could lead to some combination of (1) lower broker commissions, (2) increased velocity of sales transactions  (“better a fast nickel than a slow dime” to quote Bay Area Business Broker Julie White) , (3) more general awareness of ‘what’s available’,’ (4) better informed buyers and sellers (one could imagine opportunities for wannabe business owners to ‘pre-qualify’ as buyers), and a (5) a lessening of the importance of local information (potential buyer in Bow, New Hampshire for your start-up in Palo Alto CA … ?  no problem..).

Change is rarely easy.  Almost never painless.  But it happens.

Business brokerage, as a profession, needs to make the best of what’s inevitable.