Selling a pawn shop requires committing to taking on a considerable number of challenging and time-consuming tasks, not the least of which include pricing the pawn shop, marketing it to the right buyers, managing negotiations, and being responsible for the terms outlined in contracts or agreements.
Which task takes the greatest amount of effort to perform depends on the unique attributes and challenges of a particular pawn business, but one thing that’s true for almost all pawn shop owners/sellers across the board is that they don’t anticipate how much effort it takes to properly market a pawn business to potential buyers.
If you’re marketing your business to one or more of the major pawn companies, you’re going to want to show them that your pawn business is scalable; in other words, you’re going to want to prove that your business can grow—not just now, while it’s still yours, but in the future once the buyer takes over. This can take a lot of time to do and can be almost impossible to do well if you don’t have firsthand knowledge of the major pawn companies’ inner workings. It’s one thing to make cash flow valuations based on your records; it’s quite another to try and prepare cash flow projections for a monster like EZPAWN, Cash America or First Cash.
You should also keep in mind that although it’s almost always better to market your pawn business to multiple buyers, dealing with multiple buyers takes a lot of work. It can be all too easy to become so busy responding to buyers’ requests and inquiries that, before you know it, you’re caught up in multiple buying strategies and forking over your selling power left and right. When this happens, numbers start trending downwards. On top of that, the current business suffers. Many pawn shop owners who sell their shops on their own wind up struggling to remain profitable, or even just to keep their businesses manageable, during the marketing and selling/closing processes. Their focus is simply too split to manage both their dealings with multiple buyers and their pawn businesses well.
Pawn shop owners can make things much easier on themselves by enlisting the help of experienced pawn shop exit strategy consultants. While owners may be tempted to think, Why should I pay anything out to a consultant when I am a savvy business owner and capable negotiator, and could keep all the money for myself?, the reality is that exit strategy professionals, in addition to taking the bulk of the tasks associated with marketing pawn shops off of owners’ plates, 9.9 times out of 10, will get owners far more for their pawn businesses than they ever would have gotten on their own.
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