Less than the number you heard at a trade show, and more than the equipment would bring at auction. The honest answer is that the range for a shop your size is wide, and where you land inside it comes down to the six things above — how much of the work arrives on its own, and how much of the day still runs through you, more than anything else.

We put together an opinion of value from your own numbers rather than a multiple stuck on your revenue. It takes a few weeks and it costs you nothing to find out.

What we will not do is price it at what you would like to get. A defensible number brings offers. An aspirational one spends the listing’s best weeks being ignored, and every conversation after that is about coming down.

It depends on what you want afterwards, and it is worth deciding before we go to market rather than during. Selling both is the cleanest transaction and reaches the widest set of buyers. Keeping the property and leasing it to the buyer keeps an income stream, and plenty of owners end up better off that way — but it makes you a landlord, and the lease then sits in the middle of your own deal.

Whichever way you lean, the rent you set changes what the shop is worth to a buyer, so the two decisions have to be made together. This is also the point to bring in your CPA, because how the price gets split between the business and the property changes what you actually keep.

Because you will do this once. A shop gets one launch, and the buyers who have been looking for one like yours move quickly when it finally appears — that wave passes once, which is why the strongest offers almost always arrive in the first sixty to ninety days.

If the shop is not ready to stand up to questions when those buyers show up, you spend your best weeks explaining instead of negotiating. We do not publish until the financials are recast, the operations are written down, and the questions buyers are going to ask already have answers.

Industry estimates put the share of listed businesses that actually sell at somewhere between 20 and 40 percent, depending on the source and the size of the business. Most of what decides which side of that you land on happens before the listing goes out.

Not from us. Information is released in stages behind a signed agreement — a blind profile with no shop name first, and nothing that identifies you until a buyer has been screened. Your employees, customers, suppliers and competitors do not learn about the sale from the process.

On telling the crew: after closing, with the money cleared. Telling them early does not give them certainty, it gives them a reason to start looking — and in a trade where two good techs walking out changes what the shop is worth, that is the one risk entirely inside your control.

They are among the first things a buyer asks about, and the answer depends on whether they sit with the shop or with you. Referral relationships and fleet accounts held at the shop level, with a performance record behind them, generally carry over. Arrangements that exist because of who you are personally are harder, and a buyer will price that risk.

Where those relationships are documented and the numbers behind them are measurable, they become one of the strongest parts of the story rather than an open question.

Run the shop exactly the way you were running it when the buyer made the offer. That is not a throwaway line. A soft quarter during due diligence is the most common reason a good deal gets renegotiated down or falls apart, and a dip in car count shows up in the numbers immediately.

Everything else is ours: buyer questions, the document room, the lender, the attorneys, the landlord. We coordinate it through to closing so the deal does not stall in the last mile. Your job is the work.

Not on proof of funds alone. Someone who can write the check but cannot run a shop puts your technicians, your customers, and — if any part of your price is financed by you — your own money at risk. We qualify buyers on whether they can actually operate what they are buying.

And the biggest number is not automatically the best offer. How it gets paid, what sits in escrow, what is tied to future performance, how working capital is settled and how long you are expected to stay all change what an offer is really worth to you. We negotiate the terms, not just the headline price.

Usually for a defined transition — often thirty to ninety days for a smaller shop, longer where you hold the customer or insurer relationships personally. A buyer is not trying to keep you around; they are trying to keep what is in your head.

The more of that sits in your systems, your service history and your people before we go to market, the shorter the stay a buyer will agree to.