Questions I Wish I Asked: Before Closing

[Perrier Wells]

Closing on your first small business is equal parts exciting and unsettling. You spend most of your time talking about price, revenue, and KPIs.

What I didn’t understand until after closing was this: The most important questions aren’t financial.

These are the questions I wish I’d asked before we closed:

• What only works here because you’re involved every day?
• What breaks first when things get busy or short-staffed?
• If you were keeping this location, what would you fix next?
• What did you stop fixing once you decided to sell?
• When was the last real price increase—and what pushed you to do it?
• What do buyers consistently underestimate about running this business?

The numbers will tell you what has happened. But questions like these tell you what you’re about to inherit.

Curious—what questions do you always ask sellers that never show up on a checklist?