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 company 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 built up over the years leading up to them. Just how often this connection is underestimated is shown by the DIHK Report on Business Succession, which is based on more than 50,000 contacts from the Chambers of Industry and Commerce with business owners willing to sell. According to this, 38 percent of Alt shareholders At the time of the consultation, they were not well prepared for the handover, simply because they had started addressing the issue too late. Three-quarters of them do not turn to an external consultant until two years or less before the planned handover. The Chambers of Industry and Commerce (IHKs) themselves recommend a lead time of three to ten years. That’s why we don’t start 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 should remain of what has been built up over decades 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’s usually more work to be done there than the owner realizes. We encounter one particular pattern very frequently, 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. While well-intentioned, this has a disastrous effect, as it is precisely this approach that 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 by the seller. Each of these three factors is reflected in the purchase price. This last point is by no means a minor issue. For the DMB Risk Report: Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises 2026 Between January and April 2026, the German Association of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses surveyed more than 1,400 business owners. They assessed their dependence on the business owner 54.7 percent as 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 a lack of a succession plan. This picture is particularly pronounced among smaller businesses. What business owners say about themselves here aligns exactly with what a buyer looks for during due diligence. The report draws a conclusion from this that is familiar to us from real-world experience: namely, that such leadership risks arise internally and are addressed too late. That's exactly where the problem lies. These issues can no longer be resolved once the sales process is underway. Building a second tier of management takes at least one to two years, not one to two months. The same goes for distributing customer relationships among multiple people. A due diligence review looks back—typically over three fiscal years—and what’s there is there. Anyone who waits until after the letter of intent to start cleaning up the house 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 evidenced by the KfW's Succession Monitoring as of January 2026, with an increase in the target purchase prices of approximately one-third since 2019. You don't bridge this gap between expectations and market reality at the negotiating table. You bridge it beforehand by making the company live up to what its asking price claims. This groundwork is the part of our work that is discussed the least but 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 also upfront 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 in this regard, 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. Connect with us on, if you'd like to discuss this in more detail.
