I did not decide to sell my accounting practice and immediately think, “I should bring in a broker.” That is the expected move, and for good reason, but it never quite sat right with me. I wanted to stay close to the conversations. I wanted to decide who I spoke to, how the business was presented, and what kind of deal I was willing to accept. More than anything, I did not want someone else interpreting years of work on my behalf.
So I chose to handle it myself.
That decision sounds simple until you are in the middle of it. Selling a firm without a broker is not one clean process. It is a series of moments where you are forced to look at your business without sentiment. You stop thinking like an owner and start thinking like a buyer, and the two perspectives are not even close.
At the beginning, I described the firm the way most of us do. Stable revenue, long-standing clients, strong relationships, consistent work. All of that is true, and none of it is what a buyer is trying to understand. Buyers are not buying your past. They are buying what happens when you are no longer there. Once that clicked, the entire conversation shifted.
I had to strip the business down to what actually matters. What revenue holds without me. Where the real risk sits. How concentrated the client base is. Which relationships are tied to me personally, and which ones would transfer without friction. It is a more clinical way of looking at something you have built over time, but it is the only version that holds up under scrutiny.
The next adjustment came quickly. There is no shortage of people who will express interest in buying a firm. That part is not the problem. The problem is that most of them are not in a position to do it. Some are curious. Some are exploring the idea. Some want to compare numbers so they can measure their own progress. Very few are ready to move forward.
I learned this the slow way, through conversations that went nowhere. After a while, it becomes obvious that being accommodating does not help anyone. Now I ask direct questions early. I want to know if they have acquired a firm before, what size deal they are comfortable with, how they plan to finance it, and what kind of timeline they are working with. If those answers are unclear, the conversation ends there. It is not personal. It is practical.
What has been more interesting is where the real conversations are coming from. Not from listings or marketplaces, and not from broad outreach. The strongest interest has come from people who are already connected in some way. Existing relationships, quiet introductions, and other firm owners who were not actively looking but recognize a fit when they see one. It turns out that this is less about visibility and more about alignment. You are not trying to reach everyone. You are trying to reach the few people who immediately understand what they are looking at.
Somewhere along the way, I had to put together a short summary of the firm. That part seemed straightforward at first. It was anything but. Writing it forced a level of clarity that is easy to avoid when you are only speaking in conversations. I had to be honest about why I am selling, what kind of transition I am willing to support, and what would make me walk away from a deal even if the numbers look right. The final version is concise, but getting there required more thought than I expected.
Once the conversations move past the surface level, the focus shifts to terms. Most people assume valuation is the difficult part. It is not. In most cases, you can get within a reasonable range fairly quickly. The real negotiation happens around everything else. How long I remain involved, how client relationships are handed off, how performance is measured after the sale, and how payments are structured. These are the details that determine whether a deal actually works. A higher number does not mean much if the structure behind it creates unnecessary risk or tension.
All of this takes time. Even with steady progress, it is not a quick process. There are conversations to manage, follow-ups to send, information to share, and decisions to make, all while continuing to run the firm. There is no clean separation between selling and operating. They overlap, and some days one takes priority over the other.
At this point, it would be easy to step back and bring in a broker to take it the rest of the way. There is enough activity to justify it. Enough momentum to hand off. But I am not inclined to do that. The value in handling this myself is not just about avoiding a fee. It is about staying close to the decisions that shape the outcome. I decide who gets access to information, which conversations move forward, and what kind of buyer I am willing to work with. That level of control is difficult to give up once you have experienced it.
This approach is not for everyone. It requires time, attention, and a willingness to be direct in ways that do not always come naturally. You are not just selling a business. You are managing the entire process from start to finish. For some, that is a distraction from more important priorities. For others, it is exactly where they want to be.
In the end, the method matters less than the outcome. Whether you use a broker or not is secondary. What matters is finding the right buyer and putting together a deal that holds up once the transition begins. Everything else fades quickly after that.
