How Gateway Business Brokers Can Help You Buy Or Sell A Business
Connecting the right seller and the right buyer – that was Tim Blais’ objective when he launched Halifax-based Gateway Business Brokers.
Blais, the founder and owner of Gateway, said a knack for showing people looking to buy businesses what the process looks like, “from A to Z,” is what distinguishes Gateway – and given it a business sale rate at nine times the industry average.
“The system I have in place is more in-depth than I believe anyone else’s in the space to be,” says Blais.
Gateway’s track record of success in getting businesses sold comes from a fine-tuned system with early due diligence, thorough valuation work and marketing that presents businesses in the most favourable manner, to pique the interest of the most qualified buyers – and get banks on board to finance the sale.
Through that early work, Gateway and its highly trained and experienced staff of 12 people figures out the best compatibilities between buyers and businesses.
“Step-by-step, every little detailed piece of a transaction, from beginning to end, they have a clear vision of what’s going to be required of them, what will need to be successful and so on – all the way to the sales side of things,” says Blais.
Blais stressed the importance of this due diligence in business brokering – where he said as few as one in nine businesses listed for sale, on average, actually sell.
“I took it upon myself to figure out why the industry has such a low probability of success,” he says.
As it turns out, it all came back to the process available for business owners who want to sell.
The idea of launching Gateway came to Blais while he sought to acquire a business, himself – and didn’t know where to start.
“There are a lot of business owners out there who aren’t even that familiar with business brokers. There are a lot of first-time purchasers of businesses who don’t know what a business broker is,” Blais says.
“I was looking around and found the information out there on how to buy businesses and how they come to market to be sold was fragmented and nobody provided any guidance. There didn’t seem to be any formalized process in place that was easily understood.”
Unable to find a business that made sense for him to purchase at that time, Blais decided he was going to provide that guidance he once needed. It was from that decision that Gateway was born in 2009.
Gateway serves everyone looking to buy or sell a business – from those in semi-retirement and those who lost their job, to new immigrants to Canada and those looking to find a new source of income.
Blais also has a new venture to help in the process, the Business Selling Mastery education platform, which provides tools to help people sell their own business without the help of a broker.
It’s in this ability to cater to everyone interested in buying a business, and matching the right buyers with the right businesses, that Gateway lands so many sales from Halifax- and Calgary-based offices.
“You’ve got to have the right buyer for them to be successful, and when we can locate the right buyer, our track record of arranging financing on the deals we put together is 100 per cent,” said Blais.
“We’ve never lost a detail, and have never had a deal collapse because we couldn’t put the financing together.”
And now, Blais hopes he can reach out to people who have thought about buying a business and don’t know where to start.
“People can confidently connect with a professional that can clearly show them how easy it is to actually buy the right business for them,” he says.
This story is sponsored by Gateway Business Brokers.