Buyers and sellers of SMBs are still underserved — here’s why
At Evermark, we believe that small business owners and aspiring buyers deserve tools built around their real needs, not assumptions. That’s why research and discovery sit at the heart of everything we do.
Over the past several months, we’ve spent over 50 hours talking to buyers, sellers, brokers, and affiliates to better understand the challenges they face when buying and selling small businesses.
The bottom line? The tools and platforms that are meant to help with SMB acquisitions don’t solve the real struggles buyers, sellers, and brokers face during the acquisition process, especially if they’re new to the game.
At Evermark, we’re committed to gathering real stories from real people, and creating products that are hyper-focused on solving the biggest gaps in acquisitions.
What Sellers Struggle With
From an insect farm to a uniform outlet to an Airbnb for boat rentals, we interviewed a wide range of business owners from all kinds of industries, and learned they face a lot of the same issues when selling their business.
Finding qualified buyers
Sellers often told us the hardest part is finding a qualified buyer, especially for niche or unique businesses, or for larger, more complex deal structures.
They expressed frustration with having to deal with "tire kickers", or low-quality buyers who are not serious about purchasing, which would lead to a time-consuming, manual process of filtering and vetting buyers themselves through painstaking conversations back-and-forth over several days on an outdated messaging platform on BizBuySell, Acquire.com, or the like.
“We just didn’t get enough qualified leads… sometimes people cancelled the calls, so it was like they weren’t engaged enough with our business.”
Difficulty taking the first step to finally list — not ready for a full commitment
We learned that many sellers drag their feet when it comes to listing their business online. Why? Many of them have no idea where to start. That feeling of “I don’t know what I don’t know” is prevalent, and weighs down the average first-time seller. While there may be playbooks online, these sellers need something more – more guidance, more upfront information, more tangible steps.
“I have not explored anything. I’m dragging my feet for sure. So, I thought this was very—the universe was sending me a message to get my butt in gear when I saw your [interview request].”
And let’s not forget, selling your business can be a deeply emotional process. You’ve built it for 10, 20, 40 years, and now it’s time to let it go. The emotional attachment, coupled with the pressure of finding the “right” buyer who will accept a fair price and will be committed to growing the business you poured your life into… well, it can feel like a tall order.
“I’ve put too much heart in there to sell the business to someone who’s not going to have the same vision and who does not plan to scale like I would.”
Challenges with valuing their business
As if that isn’t enough, sellers also face uncertainty about how to value what they’ve built, especially when their business’ true worth lies in intangible assets like intellectual property, brand equity, complex processes and automations, or future growth potential. They also expressed frustration in handling real estate as part of their sale. For first-time sellers especially, these components add a layer of complexity to the sale, which can leave them in decision paralysis, prolonging their time to list.
“I know there are multipliers I should be using for value, but I feel like I don’t have enough knowledge to safely do that.”
Online valuation tools are great if you have a standard business model, but most businesses have their own nuances that aren’t accommodated by online platforms.
Difficulty marketing the business for sale
Selling a business is like selling anything – it requires a fair bit of marketing. There’s an assumption among sellers that listing their business on sites like BizBuySell, Acquire.com, and SMB.co, would be enough. But experienced sellers know it takes more than just an online listing to grab the attention of a qualified buyer.
“I didn’t think I was giving enough capacity to the marketing that I should be doing for selling it… listing it should really only be like the first thing you do.”
But a first-time seller wouldn’t have the knowledge or experience to market their business for sale themselves. They would need to rely on brokers or off-platform tools to do so, given that the popular online marketplaces don’t offer marketing services.
Even the experienced seller has insufficient time and capacity for marketing their business for sale and creating effective listings (e.g., writing descriptions, providing good photos).
Difficulty in accurately conveying the business's unique aspects
A smaller portion of buyers we interviewed expressed difficulty in conveying their business’ mission, impact, or future vision on impersonal online platforms with limited input fields. They desired a better way to communicate the intangible value, potential growth, and community impact of their business.
“One of the hardest parts of listing your business online is explaining your mission to your community… another challenge would be for me to be able to package the potential of the business in a way that potential buyers can clearly see. When you’re in the middle of building something, you can see where it’s going… but someone evaluating it on a platform, all they see is current revenue and traffic.”
What Buyers Struggle With
For every seller struggling to part with their business, there’s a buyer struggling to make sense of the marketplace. From wading through sketchy listings to feeling unsupported in a process full of unknowns, buyers experience their own set of frustrations.
Low listing quality and credibility
Buyers often find themselves frustrated by incomplete, inconsistent, outdated, vague, or non-credible listings on marketplaces, leading to extensive back-and-forth communication with sellers on an outdated and inefficient on-platform messaging system.
“BizBuySell… quality of the companies not as great and fit — smaller deals… choppy info, choppy financials.”
Additionally, lack of details about the seller, their motivations for selling, and business history hurt buyers’ confidence in the listing. They want to understand the “why” behind the business, not just the numbers.
There’s also an interesting perspective many buyers hold: that better businesses are sold off-market via private networks or brokers. They think to themselves, If a business was really successful, they wouldn’t need to resort to a common marketplace, because they should already have buyers lined up through other means.
Lack of discoverability through existing search engines
Our interviews revealed that buyers want tools that expand discovery rather than boxing them into certain listing categories – despite the filters they used to search, which may sound counterintuitive, but made sense the more we dug into it.
“This highlights a desire for features that suggest similar business ideas, akin to Netflix's recommendation system, to help them explore options beyond their initial scope.”
We learned that buyers often know why they want to buy a business, but aren’t always clear on what they want to (or can) buy that will help them achieve their desired lifestyle. This was a pivotal insight because it showed us that surfacing perfect criteria matches weren’t enough for a valuable user experience for an online marketplace. Surfacing similar business matches and off-market opportunities are just as important to nurture the discovery of new businesses buyers may not have even thought about pursuing.
Lack of buyer support (”I don’t know what I don’t know”)
Buyers also told us that navigating the process feels daunting: from figuring out how to approach sellers, to securing financing, to understanding “what comes next.” Without better support and guidance, many buyers find the buying process quite painful.
“I almost certainly will [work with a broker] again because, guys, I don’t really know what I’m doing. That’s money well spent to me to have somebody who’s done it before.”
Why This Matters At Evermark
These pain points aren’t just anecdotes—they’re patterns that highlight a deep need for change. And they matter, because behind every listing is a person: a seller who’s poured years into their business, or a buyer hoping to take the leap into entrepreneurship.
At Evermark, our commitment is simple: we’re building with empathy, backed by research. By deeply understanding the real experiences of buyers and sellers, we aim to create solutions that remove friction, build trust, and ultimately help more small businesses transition successfully.
This is just the beginning. As we continue our research and product development, we’ll keep listening—and sharing what we learn—because small business owners and aspiring buyers deserve better tools, better processes, and a better way forward.
