Thinking About Selling Your Moving Company? Read This First.

If selling your moving company is part of your long-term plan, then there's a couple of things that you need to think about to prepare ahead of time.

First, let's talk about revenue. The truth is, one really cares about revenue. Revenue is just really a vanity metric. The thing that we really care about as investors are the earnings of the company. Another term for earnings is EBITDA, which stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. So, think about your net operating income and then add those costs back into net income and that gets you your EBITDA. This is what you use to continue to grow your company, or to be able to take dividends. And as an investor looking to buy into your company, they're not looking to buy a job. They're looking to buy something that continuously generates them earnings or gives them enough money to be able to reinvest in the company to keep growing it. (And as a side note to keep in mind, usually investors aren't looking for EBITDA less than $1 million. Anything less than $1 million—that's when you're likely selling your company for assets, plus maybe a little bit of goodwill, which would be the website and the customer base. So just keep that in mind as you're planning for an exit.)

In addition to EBITDA, the other two big metrics an investor is going to be looking for is the Year-Over-Year Growth Rate (to show that the growth is steady), as well as a repeat and referral customer base. Repeat referral customer base allows them to spend less money on marketing, and to have the machine, or company, continue to grow.

To recap, EBITDA is number one. Second, steady growth in the company. And then number three, a solid repeat and referral customer base, so that the investor can keep lower marketing costs while the company grows.