A broker's job starts the day you're ready to list, not the day you decide to sell. That's the mismatch: most of the time owners call a broker, they're asking someone to list their business, and honestly, the owner hasn’t considered what a buyer wants or is willing to pay. Sometimes the business isn’t ready to be sold at all. Most brokers are paid on commission at close — which means their business model rewards listing you, not necessarily protecting you from the gap between what you think you're worth and what the market will actually pay.
That's not a criticism of brokers. It's a description of what they're built to do, and it isn't diagnostic work.
A consultant's job, done right, is the opposite: an independent, flat-fee assessment with no financial stake in whether or how you eventually sell. No success fee tied to a sale price means no incentive to tell you what you want to hear, and no reason to rush you toward a listing before the business can support the price you want.
The sequencing matters more than most owners realize. Walk into a broker conversation with clean financials, documented systems, a defensible growth story, and a realistic understanding of your valuation range, and you're negotiating from strength — the broker is selling a business that's actually ready to be sold. Walk in without that work done, and you'll get listed at an unrealistic price, sit on the market for years, and develop a reputation as a stale listing before anyone drops the number to where it should have started.
Think of it the way you'd think about selling a house: you don't call a realtor before fixing the roof and clearing out the garage. You do the improvement work first, because every dollar spent fixing what's broken usually returns more than a dollar at closing — and because a realtor's job is to market what exists, not to tell you what to fix. And most buyers will insist you hire professionals to mend what is broken…that can get costly for a few drywall repairs and some paint.
For selling your business, the right order is diagnostic, then improvement work if needed, then broker. A consultant who's also evaluated businesses from the buyer's side of the table — who knows exactly what kills a deal in diligence — can tell you before a broker ever gets involved whether you're 90 days from ready, or three years away. That's a conversation worth having first.