Buying a business can be a stressful and confusing time. Ultimately you need to know if you are going to be able to replicate the owners’ past performance and achieve the results that they achieved. This in turn depends on the representations made to you during the business purchase process. Most often the information supplied has not been audited and the concept of Caveat Emptor (Buyer Beware) applies at every stage of the process.

The complexity of the purchase is made even more difficult by many sellers producing a long list of expenses that they have claimed as deductions for tax purposes (on the basis that they were incurred in the course of deriving income), but which they claim were really of private nature and therefore nothing to do with the business.

At Maroo Advisory, we follow a simple guiding principle – the sellers cannot have it both ways and that if they had no compunction in cheating the tax man, they will have no compunction in cheating you during the business purchase process.

We have assisted a lot of clients in their business purchase journey. We bring commercial acumen to the table, work out what we believe is a fair value for the business based on data that we will share with you, undertake due diligence in the areas that you are most at risk, identify appropriate business structures for the purchase, help you prepare business plans, budgets and cash flow forecasts and business plans, help you with organising finance, help you understand the working capital needs of the business and generally help you through the business purchase maze. This experience is acquired over decades of advisory work and cannot be learnt at school, TAFE or University.

Ultimately the final test which we share we the client is the smell test. If we were in your shoes, knowing what you know and knowing what you do not know, would we invest in the business. Unless the answer is a resounding yes, we would counsel you to approach the dealings with caution. This helps our clients because we take the emotion out of the business purchase – we use our objectivity and analytical skills to ensure you buy a good business for a fair price and that with your input, creativity and flair, make a success of it.

Which road do you plan to take?

Maybe it is time for a chat over coffee with Maroo Advisory.