The question every founder asks their first advisor is whether their business is sellable. It's the wrong first question. In our experience, and in the tone of almost every Reddit thread on the subject, the more common problem isn't the business. It's the seller.
That failure comes in two very different shapes. Some founders never come to market at all, because they've convinced themselves they aren't ready — usually against a bar that doesn't exist. Others come to market and make themselves so difficult to work with that any competent buyer fades by week four. Both outcomes look, from the outside, like the business didn't sell. But the business was fine. The person selling it wasn't.
A comment on r/smallbusiness said it in seven words we've never been able to top:
Sellers we are not innocent in this process!
— r/smallbusiness
The founder who never came to market
The clearest version of the first failure showed up in a post from a founder who eventually did sell — after three decades and four failed attempts:
The two biggest mistakes I made: believing you need $10M+ in topline revenue before anyone will take you seriously. This bad advice kept me from trying for years.
— r/Entrepreneur
Read that carefully. The business was sellable the whole time. He wasn't. Not because of anything about the company — because of a made-up threshold he'd absorbed from someone else's advice. He waited until he was in his sixties to find out that buyers had been ready for the version of his business that existed in his forties.
We hear a version of this every month. When we hit a million. After the next hire. Once the second location is stable. Once I've had one more good year. Some of these are legitimate. Most are the same threshold that kept the Reddit poster on the sidelines for thirty years. The market for small businesses is enormous, active, and starts at revenue numbers that would surprise most first-time sellers. The founder who's waiting for the mythical valuation event has already priced themselves out of thirty years of real ones.
The founder who came to market and killed the deal
The second failure is louder and more embarrassing, which is probably why it's so rarely written about. An ex-broker on r/smallbusiness put up what looked like a routine five-point list of why 80% of small businesses don't sell. Points one, two, four, and five were the usual — unrealistic prices, no exit planning, DIY marketing with “crazy upbeat IMs and hockey stick projections,” bad timing.
Point three was the one that stopped us:
Sellers refuse to cooperate during the sales process, or have abrasive personalities that can kill a deal.
— r/smallbusiness
Almost no M&A blog talks about this. Advisors avoid it because it's uncomfortable. Sellers can't diagnose it in themselves, because from the inside, being difficult always feels like being careful.
But from the buyer's side it looks like this. Emails take a week to answer. Documents that were promised at the start of diligence never appear, or arrive with pieces missing. Every question about the numbers gets a slightly defensive explanation. Every reasonable request is treated as an attack. Cold feet arrive on schedule at every stage — the LOI, the deep-dive, the final SPA. The seller renegotiates small terms they'd already agreed to. They start bringing in a friend who “knows about M&A.” They go quiet for ten days without explanation.
None of this is fraud. None of it is even bad faith. It's a founder who has decided, without quite realising it, that being examined is an insult — and is defending themselves against it in the only ways available to them.
Buyers don't confront it. They just fade. And the seller is left thinking the buyer wasn't serious, or the offer wasn't real, or the market was soft — instead of the actual answer, which is that a stranger had to imagine spending sixty days negotiating with them, and decided it wasn't worth it.
Being buyable is a skill
Both failures are the same thing underneath. The seller was not, at the moment the sale needed to happen, someone a buyer could work with. In the first case, because they never showed up at all. In the second, because they showed up in a way that made the transaction unpleasant.
Being buyable is a specific skill, and most founders never practice it. It has almost nothing to do with the business fundamentals. It looks like this:
- You reply to emails within a business day.
- You produce the document that was asked for, in full, on the timeline you agreed to.
- You answer hard questions about the numbers directly, without editorialising.
- You disclose the things that are broken instead of hoping they won't be found.
- You don't renegotiate anything you've already agreed to. You don't ghost.
- When something you didn't expect comes up in diligence, you treat it as part of the process, not as a personal attack.
That list looks like table stakes. It isn't. Most deals that die in the last thirty days die because the seller couldn't do one or two of the things on it.
What a good advisor is actually rehearsing you for
If half the work in the year before a sale is about the business — the books, the founder dependency, the quiet market check — the other half is about the seller. This half almost nobody writes about, because it sounds patronising to say out loud.
But it's real. The founders who close in ninety days at their target price are, almost without exception, people who have already been through the rehearsal. They've been asked the hard questions in a low-stakes room. They've seen their own numbers challenged by someone who isn't a friend. They've felt the specific discomfort of an outsider probing something they built, and learned that the discomfort isn't personal — it's the job. By the time the real buyer arrives, they aren't defending. They're presenting.
Founders who haven't done that rehearsal do it live, with a real buyer, and it usually costs them the deal or the price.
The feedback that never reaches you
There's one last thing worth naming, because it's why this failure mode keeps repeating. Buyers don't tell sellers why they walked away. They fade. They stop replying. They make polite noises about “not being the right fit at this time.” They never say the thing that would actually be useful, which is: I liked your business. I didn't like the prospect of spending sixty days with you.
Which means most sellers who kill their own deal never find out they did. They learn that “the market is difficult,” or “buyers are opportunistic,” or “the offer wasn't serious.” They almost never learn the real thing. And the next time they come to market, they make the same mistake in the same way without knowing it — which is how you end up on your fourth attempt in thirty years.
If you're honest with yourself and any of this landed uncomfortably — the internal bar you haven't hit yet, the difficulty of imagining handing every document to a stranger, the version of yourself that shows up when someone questions your numbers — that discomfort is the useful part. It's not a reason to keep waiting for the version of you that would find it easier. It's a reason to start the work now. Book a private consultation and we'll be honest with you about both the business and the seller.
A note on the sources
The observations in this piece draw on public discussions across r/smallbusiness and r/Entrepreneur. Quotes are lightly edited for length.