How to Actually Sell a Business

4 tips I wish I knew sooner…

Sharran Srivatsaa

Sep 12, 2026

I’ve exited 5 businesses and built 2 billion-dollar businesses.

I’ve learned what investors are looking for when they want to buy your business and how to actually sell it to them.

But I’ve also learned the selling mistakes the hard way that have cost me millions…

And so this is why I’ve put together 4 tips I wish I’d known about sooner when selling a business.

Starting with…

1. Get skin in the game before you build any infrastructure

Don’t hire an operator or create an acquisition strategy until you’ve closed one business deal yourself, even if it’s a small one.

Why?

A real deal shows you what you don’t know yet that you won’t find on paper.

This means you go through the deal process as a buyer. And then take note of any problems you experienced to make sure they don’t happen during your business sale.

Because until your own money is on the line, you don’t actually know what problems matter to investors.

And once you know what those problems are, they become part of your business plan.

2. Start the sale process years before you want to sell

I put my company up for sale 5 times, but I didn’t want to sell it… yet.

When my partners and I took over Teles, we were doing $300 million in sales.

We were:

Building features
Improving the product
Trying to grow organically

But here is the thing:

We were guessing.

We didn’t know what would actually make potential buyers want us.

So I put the company up for sale, and I asked the buyers a simple question:

“I’m not looking for a number. I just want to understand how you think about valuation. What would need to happen for this to be worth $75 million instead of $50 million?”

And so the buyers told me there were six specific things they wanted. I walked out of that meeting and went straight to my COO.

I handed my COO the list and said:

“This is our entire business plan for the next twelve months. Nothing else.”

When years 3, 4, and 5 came around, it was the exact same process.

So by the time we were done, Teles had been built almost entirely to the buyer’s specification.

Eventually, we sold to Douglas Elliman.

So start three years early and ask this one question:

“What would need to be true for me to make this business even more valuable to a buyer?”

And then build exactly that over the next year, while asking yourself that same question annually.

This means by the time you’re really negotiating a sale, you’ve already overcome every objection a buyer has before they step in the room…

3. Use one clear, public ask to generate deal flow

You don’t need to hire a banker or spend a year cold-emailing people to find buyers.

Just make one clear, honest public post describing exactly what you’re looking for to the right audience.

This will bring you more qualified leads in a week than most people get from a year of blasting cold emails.

I’ll give you an example:

Last year me and Alex Hormozi posted one Instagram story and sent one email about a fintech thesis we were exploring.

Just 4 pieces of content between us.

And within 48 hours, we had 500 completed inbound forms from operators interested in the opportunity and scheduled 20 meetings in a single week.

4. Judge the deal by return on hassle, not just return on capital

The truth is, money isn’t always your limiting resource… it can be your mental energy and attention.

This is why a deal structure that reduces your stress and workload can be worth more than the extra profit or equity you’d get from more complex deal structures.

And the reality is, you don’t always need to own the whole deal.

Because owning a third of a deal can sometimes be the smarter, less-stressful move.

So share deals with good people to take the extra load off, and they’ll also share more good deals with you in the future.

Now if there’s one thing to take away from these 4 selling tips, make it this:

Build your company as if you plan to sell it. Because even if you never do, thinking like a future buyer forces you to build a stronger business today.

And if you enjoyed this post, I talk about how to create generational wealth in this next one: