Top 5 Reasons Your Restaurant Isn't Selling
Apr 11, 2017 by Fatima Mansoor, Researcher, Restaurants for Sale Global
Top 5 Reasons Your Restaurant Isn’t Selling
It’s not every day you put up your restaurant for sale. But once that day comes, you eagerly wait for the day someone makes a good offer. Wondering why that day hasn’t arrived yet? See if any of these 5 reasons have something to do with it.
1. Buyers Can't Find Your Restaurant Opportunity
An increasing number of business buyers are searching online. If your restaurant isn’t listed on an online portal, many potential buyers, good buyers, would pass you by. Restaurants for Sale Global is an excellent place for listing your restaurant. Unlike a generic classified with numerous other categories, this is a specialized listing service for people looking to buy or sell a restaurant.
2. It's Priced Way Too High
More often than not, the market will impact what price your restaurant will fetch you. Yes, good financial performance does warrant a premium. If you’ve made a name for your restaurant, you will be able to cash it at selling time. However, this shouldn’t make you put up an outrageous price tag. Maybe your buyer isn’t able to run the place as successfully as you did. While that is not your problem per se, the potential risk is still there and it will affect what will ultimately be considered a fair selling price.
At the end of the day, your restaurant really is only worth what potential buyers are willing to pay for it. This might even go against your instincts and your love for your restaurant, but if it helps you manage your expectations and reconsider the selling price, you will improve your chances of selling at a good price.
3. Your Timing is Off
Selling your restaurant at the right time is crucial. Businesses are invariably worth more during their ascendancy, when sales and profits have grown in recent times, before plateauing. Remember, the next owner of your restaurant would want to be reassured that he/she will see a good return on their investment. Declining sales or even stagnant figures would not provide this reassurance.
Ideally you should sell your restaurant when it is at its most valuable, and not when you feel like it’s simply time to walk away. For instance, if you’re heading for retirement, waiting till your drive and passion is dissolved will adversely affect your trade level and this will be reflected in your selling price.
4. Your Photos Aren’t Great
You wouldn’t advertise an entree or a special dessert with a shoddy picture would you? Certainly your restaurant deserves the same, if not better, treatment. When you put your restaurant up for sale, there’s a tendency to think that the buyers are sharp businesspeople with savvy accountants as part of their counsel. That the quality of your restaurant’s listing images is not that important to the sale.
While your ideal buyer might be a shrewd businessperson, we as humans are known to make many decisions with our limbic brains i.e. the emotional part of our brain. So the thumbnail and other images of your restaurant’s listing could very well be the element that catch the right buyer’s attention and make your listing immediately more likeable. You won’t close your deal based on the images themselves of course. However, you sure can lose a potential buyer because of them.
5. You’re Not Pursuing Multiple Buyers
Granted, your restaurant isn’t a mass-market product. On the contrary, you may very well have an emotional attachment with the entity and would want to find “someone worthy” to run it after you. This kind of thinking, while commendable on its own, often makes restaurant owners narrow down their search for potential buyers.
In their quest for finding the ideal buyer, they resist pursuing multiple buyers. Ironically enough, this makes it difficult for them to sell their restaurant. If you’re making this mistake, it might be a reason you haven’t found a buyer for your restaurant yet.