The key course for a successful sale of a business will long before the first sales meeting held. What in the current trial not anymore to be made up is.
When an entrepreneur calls us for the first time, the question is almost always the same: What is my business worth? It’s a valid question, but it’s rarely the first one that should be answered. That’s because the value a buyer is ultimately willing to pay isn’t determined during negotiations. It’s determined in the years leading up to them. The DIHK report on business succession, which is based on over 50,000 contacts made by Chambers of Industry and Commerce with business owners willing to sell. According to the report, 38percent of outgoing owners arenot well prepared for the handover at the time of consultation, simply because they addressed the issue too late. Three-quarters do not turn to an external advisor until two years or less before the planned handover. The Chambers of Industry and Commerce themselves recommend a lead time of three to ten years.
That is why we do not begin a mandate with an assessment, but by listening. How has the company grown? What does the owner value most? What role does the family play? What, of what has been built up over decades, should remain after the handover? Only once these questions have been clarified can we meaningfully discuss what still needs to be done with the company itself. And there is usually more work to be done there than the owner realizes. We encounter one pattern particularly often, and the DIHK report describes it as well. In anticipation of the handover, many owners scale back their investments and postpone digitalization projects because they assume the successor will decide on these matters according to their own vision anyway. Well-intentioned, but with disastrous consequences, because this is precisely what causes the business to lose its appeal. Imagine a supplier with seventy employees that hasn’t made any major replacement investments in four years, whose inventory management runs on a homemade system, and where all key customer contacts rest solely with the owner. From a business management perspective, the company is completely healthy. For a buyer, however, this means a backlog of investments, integration risk, and a concentration risk embodied in the seller himself. Each of these three factors is reflected in the purchase price.
This last point is by no means a minor issue. For the DMB SME Risk Report 2026 , the German Association for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (DMB) surveyed more than 1,400 business owners between January and April 2026. Fifty-fourpoint seven percent rated dependence on the owneras a high or very high risk, making it one of the highest-rated individual risks in the entire survey. Dependence on individual key personnel follows at 45.2 percent, while 31.1 percent cite the lack of a succession plan. This trend is particularly pronounced among smaller businesses. What entrepreneurs say about themselves in this regard aligns exactly with what a buyer looks for during due diligence. The report draws a conclusion that is familiar to us from real-world experience: namely, that such leadership risks arise internally and are addressed too late.
That is precisely the problem.These issues can no longer be resolved during the ongoing sales process. Building a second tier of management takes at least one to two years, not one to two months. The same applies to distributing customer relationships among multiple people. A due diligence review looks back—usually over three fiscal years—and what’s in the records is what’s in the records. Anyone who waits until after the letter of intent to start cleaning up the mess won’t put buyers at ease—it will make them more wary. Every weakness then becomes a pricing issue, and multiple pricing issues lead to renegotiation. This is also where the gap arises that the DIHK report quantifies elsewhere. According to IHK consultants, 36 percent of the former owners they advise are asking for an inflated purchase price, and the fact that expectations have risen further recently is confirmed by the KfW’s Succession Monitoring Report from January 2026, which shows that target purchase prices have risen by about one-thirdsince 2019. This gap between expectations and market reality isn’t closed at the negotiating table. It’s closed beforehand by making the company live up to what the asking price claims it is.
This groundwork is the part of our work that is talked about the least, yet it has the greatest impact on the outcome. At Albia Capital, we deliberately take the time to do this before launching a process, and we’re open with entrepreneurs when, in our view, eighteen months of preparation makes more sense than an immediate market entry. The fact that we’ve held entrepreneurial responsibility ourselves helps here, because we understand both sides of this decision—the business side and the personal side. So please feel free to contact us at any time, with no obligation and, of course, in complete confidence contact usif you’d like to discuss this in more depth.
