There's a statistic that circulates in the sell-side world so often it's become background noise. Depending on who you ask, somewhere between 70 and 80% of small businesses listed for sale never sell. Not “sell for less than the founder wanted.” Never sell at all. Come off the market. Get relisted. Sit for years. Eventually shut down, or transfer for the value of the assets minus the debt.
Most founders hear that number and assume it's the businesses that were bad. Some of them were. But if you spend time in the same threads, the answers from the people who actually do this work — brokers on X, ex-brokers on Reddit, mid-market M&A operators — keep pointing at something else.
An ex-broker on r/smallbusiness laid out the five reasons in a much-shared post:
Unrealistic price expectations. No exit planning. Sellers who refuse to cooperate, or have abrasive personalities that kill the deal. DIY sellers who write crazy upbeat memos with hockey-stick projections. Bad timing.
— r/smallbusiness
Read the list carefully. All five are about the seller. None of them are about the business.
That's the pattern we want to write about. Because if you zoom out on all of it — the Reddit venting, the X threads from brokers like Mike O'Brien and Matt Larsen, the private-equity operators talking about what they'll actually pay for — you land at the same sentence every time. The founder built the business to run. They didn't build it to be sold. And those are two very different things.
The five failures, and the one underneath them
Here's the honest version of what the brokers keep saying, in the order it usually kills a sale.
Starting too late
By far the most common failure. A retirement date is next year. A health scare arrives. A partner wants out. The founder engages a broker, and the broker delivers the bad news: a proper sale takes six to twelve months minimum, and a business that hasn't been prepped can take eighteen to twenty-four. One founder posted:
My business will generate $50k in profit next year but 5x that in two years. Is it sellable?
— r/smallbusiness
The answer is no, not really — because he was asking with a two-year runway for a business that needed three. The reply from an experienced broker was blunt: you should have started three years ago. Even BizBuySell, the platform that lists the deals, tells its own users the timeline is six to twelve months. Founders read it and still arrive at month six of a six-month deadline.
Unrealistic prices
The founder anchors to what they put into the business. The buyer anchors to what they'll earn from it. Those two numbers are rarely close. Matt Larsen (@sellmycompany on X) posts a version of this weekly. Overpriced businesses sit on the market for six to twelve months, get zero real offers, then get cut by 30 to 50%. By that point, the market has seen the listing go stale, which is its own signal — and the eventual sale price is worse than an honest one would have been at the start.
The Reddit version, from a broker replying to a frustrated seller:
Sorry, you're overpriced. More often than not, sellers want more than the business is worth, and the months it takes to sell are wasted.
— r/smallbusiness
The business isn't actually sellable
This is the one founders find hardest to hear, because it isn't a pricing problem or a marketing problem — it's a structural one. The books are a mess. The owner is the business. Revenue is flat or lumpy. There's no team, no systems, no documented processes. Quality brokers, the ones who run real processes, simply don't take these deals. One commenter said it plainly:
Dealing with owners of profitable but poorly structured SMBs — they're motivated to sell, but they don't want to understand that a tremendous amount of work has to be done to prep the business.
— r/smallbusiness
In the micro-market — anything under half a million in earnings — the failure rate is closer to 90%, because the deals that do get listed are usually the ones a serious broker wouldn't touch, sitting on a listings site until the seller gives up.
The wrong broker, or no broker at all
The mid-market has good advisors. The small-business end is a swamp. Founders describe getting calls every five to ten minutes from brokers who just want the listing — collect the retainer, drop it on BizBuySell, and hope it sells itself. On the other side, founders with real businesses can't get serious brokers to take them, because a $500k deal at a 10% success fee just isn't worth a good advisor's time. The seller either settles for someone mediocre or goes DIY, and the DIY version — as one X thread put it — usually looks like “crazy upbeat memos with hockey-stick projections” that mark the seller as an amateur before the first meeting.
The deeper issue, and it comes up constantly:
Business brokers are killing deals and sellers don't even realise it.
— X, mid-market M&A commentary
A real M&A process is an auction — a targeted list of strategic buyers, a proper information memorandum, competitive tension, and a run book. A bad broker treats it like a property listing. Sellers usually can't tell the difference until the process is over and they're wondering why it didn't work.
The founder is the business
This is the elephant in every room. Mike O'Brien (@sellsmb on X) has posted about it more than almost any other topic, and lower-middle-market PE operators mirror it from the buyer's side. The buyer's first question is: if the founder walks out the day after signing, does the business still work? If the answer is no — no second-in-command, personal relationships with every client, a P&L where a big chunk of the “profit” is really the founder's compensation, everything running in the founder's head — the buyer prices it as a 10 to 25% discount. Or, more often, they don't engage at all.
The Reddit version is the most-upvoted concern in the whole corpus:
Selling a business with a founder's salary on the P&L — how do you position it?
— r/smallbusiness
The answer, from every experienced voice on both platforms, is the same: you don't position it at the sale. You depersonalise the business before you start selling. And that takes years, not months.
Five failures, one root
Read those five carefully and they're not really five problems. They're five faces of the same one.
A founder who started too late is a founder who didn't think of the business as something to be exited. A founder with unrealistic prices is one who priced from the inside, not from the buyer's chair. A founder with a business that isn't sellable didn't build it to be sold — they built it to run. A founder who picks the wrong broker doesn't know what a real process looks like, because they've never been on the other side of one. And a founder who is the business is, quite literally, a founder who never separated themselves from it.
The X and Reddit voices converge on the same sentence, over and over, in slightly different phrasings:
You built it to run. You didn't build it to sell. Those are two different companies.
That's the whole thing. Every one of the five failures is downstream of that one design choice, made years earlier, usually without the founder realising they were making it. The business was engineered to function with the founder in it. The buyer is asking to buy the version that functions without them. It's a different product. And you can't build a different product in the six months before you sell.
The founders who do exit well
There's a consistent profile in the same threads for the sellers who close well. They aren't smarter or luckier. They started earlier — usually two to three years before the target date. They spent that time on the unglamorous work: cleaning up the books so a stranger could read them, hiring or promoting a second-in-command, moving customer relationships off their personal cell phone, documenting the things that lived in their head. They accepted a valuation the market would actually pay, rather than the one their peer got at his headline sale. And they chose an advisor who ran a real process, with a targeted list of buyers and competitive tension, instead of a listings-site broker who was going to hope for the best.
None of that is complicated. It's just that almost nobody does it, because it doesn't feel urgent until it's too late to matter.
The uncomfortable read
If you're reading this and you're within three years of a possible sale, here's the useful question. Not is my business sellable? — that's the question every founder asks first, and it's usually the wrong one. The better question is: if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, would anyone else be able to run this without a six-month crisis? Because that's the version of the business the buyer is actually pricing. If the honest answer is no, the price they'll offer will reflect that, and no amount of pitching will move it.
The good news is that the answer isn't fixed. A business that's currently un-sellable can become sellable, but the work takes eighteen to thirty-six months and the founder has to start before they feel ready. The bad news is that most founders wait until they feel ready — which usually means they wait until they've already run out of time.
If any of this landed — the internal deadline that used to feel comfortable and doesn't anymore, the honest recognition that the business is still mostly you, the suspicion that your current advisor might be the “hope it sells itself” kind — that's the useful signal. Not a reason to keep waiting for a better moment. A reason to start the work now, while there's still runway to make the version of the business a buyer will actually pay for. Book a private consultation and we'll tell you honestly where you stand.
A note on the sources
The observations in this piece draw on public discussions across r/smallbusiness and r/Entrepreneur, and on X threads from sell-side advisors including @sellsmb (Mike O'Brien), @sellmycompany (Matt Larsen), @bizbuysell, and lower-middle-market M&A commentators. Quotes are lightly edited for length.