It's not usually the business. It's the timing, and how ready it really was.
Most owners assume that once a business goes on the market, it sells. That's the whole point of listing it, after all.
It's worth knowing this isn't how it usually plays out. Research from the exit planning industry suggests only around 20–30% of businesses that go to market actually sell. The majority don't — not because they're bad businesses, but because something wasn't ready when the process started.
That's a hard number to sit with if you're already thinking about your own timing. So it's worth understanding what actually separates the businesses that sell from the ones that don't.
A profitable business with decent revenue can still fail to sell. What usually derails a sale isn't the P&L — it's things that only become visible once a buyer starts looking closely: how dependent the business is on the owner personally, whether systems exist beyond what's in someone's head, whether the numbers presented hold up under real scrutiny.
None of that shows up on a listing. It shows up midway through a process, often after months have already gone by.
A lot of owners wait until they're ready to leave before they think seriously about whether the business is ready to be sold. Those are two different kinds of ready, and they don't always arrive at the same time.
The businesses that go to market and actually sell are usually the ones where that gap has already been closed — where the owner understood, before the process started, what a buyer would actually be looking at.
If you're already sure you want to sell, this isn't a reason to wait indefinitely. It's a reason to have an honest look at where things stand before you're in the middle of a live process, under time pressure, with a buyer already asking questions you weren't expecting.
And if you're not sure yet whether now is even the right time — that uncertainty is common, and it's a reasonable place to start from. Understanding what "ready" actually looks like doesn't commit you to anything. It just means that whenever you do decide, you're not finding it out the hard way.
This is one piece of a much bigger picture, and every business is different. If it would help to talk through where things stand for yours, specifically, that conversation is free and entirely private.