What If I Don’t Like the Offers I Get?
The Market Is Pricing Your Risk, Not Your Effort
The first offer comes in, and the room changes.
Up until that point, the business exists in a kind of protected space. The owner has a number in mind, often shaped by years of effort, a few conversations with peers, and maybe a rule of thumb they picked up along the way. The number feels reasonable. Sometimes it even feels conservative.
Then the market answers.
Not with a debate, but with a price.
I’ve watched this moment play out. The owner reads the offer, pauses, and starts looking for what must be wrong with it. The buyer doesn’t understand the upside. The timing isn’t ideal. The structure is too aggressive. The multiple feels low compared to what they’ve heard.
All of those reactions can be valid. But they often obscure a more important question.
What if the offer is telling you something accurate?
From the advisory side, this is where owners tend to anchor to their internal narrative. They think about what the business “should” be worth based on effort, growth potential, or how it compares to others in their network. They assume the gap between expectation and offer is a negotiation problem.
From the broker side, the dynamic looks different. Buyers are not pricing your past effort or your intent. They are pricing risk transfer. They are asking a simple question: “What needs to go right after I own this, and how confident am I that it will?”
That gap between your story and their underwriting is where most disappointment lives.
An offer is not a verdict on your business. It is a priced view of your risk.
What owners often miss is that the first offer is rarely just about that buyer. It’s an early signal about how the market interprets your business. If multiple buyers arrive at similar ranges, it becomes harder to argue that they are all wrong in the same way.
This is where the second-order effects begin.
If you reject offers without understanding why they cluster where they do, you’re not preserving leverage. You’re losing information. And information is what allows you to change the outcome.
I’ve seen owners walk away from offers they didn’t like, convinced that a better buyer would appear later. Sometimes that happens. More often, the next round of offers looks similar, or worse. The market has a way of converging.
The third-order effect is more subtle. Once a business has been quietly marketed and doesn’t transact, future buyers become more cautious. They may not know the full history, but they sense friction. The deal feels “shopped.” That perception alone can compress value.
This is why it is better to fairly price it from the beginning and not start with an aspirational price.
There are reasonable counterarguments. Timing does matter. Markets shift. A business that is about to inflect can look underpriced in a static snapshot. Some buyers do misread opportunities. And in certain cases, holding and improving the business leads to a materially better outcome.
But those are strategic decisions, not emotional reactions to an uncomfortable number.
The distinction matters.
If you don’t like the offers you get, you have three real options.
You can accept that the market is accurately pricing your current risk profile and decide whether the outcome still meets your goals.
You can step back and change the business so that buyers see less risk or more durable value, then re-engage later from a stronger position.
Or you can continue forward without adjusting either expectations or fundamentals, and hope the next buyer sees something different.
Only one of those paths reliably changes the outcome.
What I’ve found in practice is that most owners delay this decision. They neither accept nor fix. They linger in the process, waiting for a better answer to appear. That delay has a cost. Momentum fades, buyer urgency declines, and the process becomes heavier each time it’s restarted.
When offers come in below expectation, the productive move is not to argue with them. It’s to decode them. What specific risks are being priced? Customer concentration, owner dependence, margin volatility, weak middle management, inconsistent growth. The list is usually shorter than it feels.
Once you can name those risks clearly, you have something you can work on.
Until then, you’re just pushing a bad position.
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David Hermann, CEO of hermanngroup and M&A Advisor and Licensed Broker at Sunbelt Business Brokers of Colorado
David Hermann is the advisor founders call when the stakes are real.
As CEO of HermannGroup and an M&A Advisor and Licensed Broker with Sunbelt Business Brokers of Colorado, he helps owners turn complex businesses into valuable, sellable assets and navigate exits without regret. His work has driven over $500M in documented financial improvements, blending strategy, change leadership, and deal execution into decisions that actually compound.
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