How I Knew When It Was Time To Sell My Business And Why I Sold It

In every businessman's life comes a point where it is time to give up. There are various reasons why one can forego their business and make a new step in their life. Some of the reasons to sell your business are social, others -- financial. I've made a research on the most popular reasons for selling a business and the most common ones are retirement, divestment (releasing the value of your business so that it can be invested elsewhere), relocation, poor performance, moving on to other opportunities, etc.

In my case I have learned the hard way that there isn't a place for everyone on the market. Firstly, the capital I invested in the business didn't regain as fast as I expected. It was at a late point when I realized that in most businesses it takes years to start making a profit. In most of the cases people running small businesses don't have that much time.

Secondly, the taxes on the income turned out to be much higher than I expected. They were in fact so high that nearly half of my earnings went to their payment. Moreover, the paperwork which needed to be done was unbearable in its amount, especially for an unprepared person with almost no experience in that area, like me.  

Thirdly, almost from the beginning the business started sucking back most of the profit and as a result I didn't have as much resources as I expected to spend on anything else -- if I wanted it to grow I had to reinvest a big part of my earnings. It wasn't all about money, but time and energy as well. My free time shrunk drastically and at one point I had no time for either friends or family.

As I soon found out, these were not the only problems a small business owner can face. Paperwork and financial issues, however scary they are, can be overcome. With time you inevitably learn to manage your time and money and all the small problems subside. There is one problem that proves to be more persistent than the others -- competition. By competition I mean, for example, a new supermarket being opened in your neighborhood. It will surely be better than your middle-class shop in some areas -- by providing goods with better quality, selling them on lower prices or providing a wider choice to the customers. Surely, you can't beat them in all of these areas -- you must strive to find the right balance between the quality of the services you offer and their price. However, finding this balance can prove to be a hard, sometimes impossible task for many business owners, especially when they don't have the resources of the big corporations to make market researches, surveys among the customers, etc.

All in all, these little and bigger challenges standing in my way made me eventually give up on my business and sell it. There wasn't an exact moment in time when I realized I have to sell it. Actually, all of the things kept coming one after another and at one point I made the decision that it is time to throw away what seemed to me like a great idea before and move on.