How Long Does It Take To Sell My Marketing Agency?

When you finally say to yourself, I want to sell my marketing agency, you may think that things will move quickly. But the reality is that the waiting can be long and is often the hardest part. Normally – the process in its entirety is 3-4 months. However, knowing exactly what happens before, during, and after the sale of your marketing agency should provide the needed transparency to help you manage the process. Ensuring that the process is followed and handled professionally will make sure that counting the days was worth it in the end. Here, we help you understand the necessary steps – and the expected timeline attached to each of them – so that you can get a clear understanding as to how long it takes to sell your marketing agency.

First things first. Before you jump into the deep and run the risk of amping up the expectations, you may want to ensure that you are ready to sell in the first place. Has your agency been showing sustainable growth, year-on-year? Are your margins raising eyebrows or just red flags? Are you delivering an EBITDA of $500k and up? If you need a quick reality check and a reminder of what an agency buyer will be looking for in the first place, take a look at our article dedicated to just this here.

While there is some flexibility around the exact duration of each element required to make the sale of your agency a success, the process that will take you there is very defined. Normally – the process in its entirety is 3-4 months. Here is the step by step:

• Initially, there is a valuation period before any agency owner enters the circle of sellers. This period requires the vetting of financials to get an accurate picture of what’s on offer. Once a price is agreed upon, the listing agreement is prepped and signed before a listing goes live. Expect this readying stage to take up to 1 week.
• Once your listing is live, it’s showtime. We do our homework on who would make the perfect fit before we scour the network to align your positioning and performance with a buyer’s long-term goals. We give this stage a solid month to generate enough leads in order to begin issuing a first term sheet.
• Once there is a genuine offer in place, expect a further two weeks to transform those initial leads into a detailed LOI.
• Finally, turning a serious buyer’s intention into a closed deal will take…well, it will take the time it takes, really. The due diligence timeline is correlated with a buyer’s thoroughness and a seller’s previous processes. As a benchmark, we attach an expected duration of 45 days – but that can move in either direction. Expect to be able to improve on this timeline with more sophisticated buyers that have gone through this before. In addition, the required paperwork to close a deal will be produced during this 45-day window, which takes into account a small buffer for the required back and forth.

Depending not just on the experience but the type of buyer, the pace of the process can move in either direction as well. Strategic buyers with an eye for an operational fit will typically move faster while entrepreneurial types will take more time as they are likely entertaining more options. Financial buyers will put their targets through a Quality of Earnings report (think of this like a mini-audit), which can add another 3-5 weeks to the process.

Beyond getting the alignment right, which is something out of a seller’s hands, a seller can help shorten the timeline as well. If a buyer and seller remain in agreement with the initial closing docs, and if a seller is well-organized and on top of his operations and financials during the due diligence process, this will help drive up confidence and drive down duration.