You’ve never been known as someone who has trouble making decisions. But here you are swinging like a pendulum when it comes to following through on selling your business.

You’ve taken your business as far as you can. You have other ideas about what you’d like to do with the rest of your life while you still have the health to act on it. Your wife is keen on travelling and although you’ve managed to take a vacation every year, it’s not the same as really stepping away from all the pressures of the business.  It’s a weight you’ve carried for many years— your shoulders loosen up at the mere thought of releasing it.  You want out.

So what are buyers looking for in a business?

Whether it’s their first purchase of a business or their 10th, buyers are looking for an ongoing income.

Not surprisingly then, they’ll be attracted by businesses with a proven track record of consistent financial performance with solid, growing revenue and earnings.

Most of the people who come to us to buy a business are first-time buyers. And likewise, most of the business owners who contact us about selling their business have never gone through the process before. Buying or selling, there’s a lot for them to absorb. And while we do our best to guide them each step of the way, the subject matter can be a bit daunting for those unused to the terms that come up as we help them get to their goal line.

We’ve pulled together the following "dictionary" with commonly used terms applied in buying or selling a business. And as a further reference, we’ve tied most of them back to blogs posts where they appear in context.

As a buyer, you are excited about the opportunity to purchase a business and confident you have enough money for its purchase. But do you have enough money to keep it “working?” If you plan to grow the business, do you have enough working capital to fund its growth? Growing businesses require more working capital than shrinking businesses as receivables are growing.

Proper pricing is a must when you go to sell your business. And that means an asking price that is reasonable and correct.

In a recent 2015 post, I noted that more mid-sized businesses in the Canadian market are turning to complementary acquisitions with fold-ins or add-ons that allow the buyer to add on the revenue of the acquisition without the costs the seller (and their smaller business) had.

As we enter the New Year with renewed resolve and resolutions, I've been asked to say more about these financial benefits. Think of them as goals for fiscal fitness!

Here are some 20 ways companies acquiring smaller firms reduce costs and gain operational efficiencies:

“Where Are All the Baby Boomer Sellers?” asks a new Axial Forum article by Robert Flynn.

In Canada?

Maybe.

Flynn notes that in the U.S., “business for sale listings (mostly Main Street and often with less than $500,000 annual revenues) on the major transaction sites, as well as the middle market business brokerage firm listings are down in almost every North East state we track compared to five ago.” Yet “the 2013-15 period was predicted to be the peak of the baby boomer selling boom.”

On the other hand, while we still have way more buyers than sellers in Canada, our market for buying or selling a business is heating up. And in that market, the older boomers are selling and the younger boomers are buying.