

Ask HN: How do we sell our profitable dev shop? - consult_temp

Both of us are regular contributors to HN. We are two partners who have a dev consulting company. We need 2 sell it &quot;quickly&quot; (other opportunities - we have a great working relationship and biz is growing). One of us could stay on full-time and the other one would leave, if we sold.<p>Our company does python, ruby, scala. No Java&#x2F;PHP. Some Apps. We have a full pipeline of work for months. We do not do outbound BD. We have a staff of about 15 people. We are half in the US &#x2F; half offshore. Almost all are on US timezones.<p>A US buyer w&#x2F;US devs that wants more offshore devs could be great.<p>We are jolly good at what we do. Our clients like us. We have some popular apps and websites that our clients built.<p>Sorry for being so vague. We are sure its a good business to sell. do not want to upset existing customers or employees and we are both popular enough on hacker news that people may notice. We do not know how to find a buyer!<p>an email is in our profile (or comment here?)
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projectramo
Annual revenue is there, but what are the annual earnings? I think the
investor would just clip coupons and wouldn't want to manage it so the
question is: what is the coupon? (You might be able to do the same:If you
don't need the money but just want the time, wouldn't the person leaving just
make their dividends? And the person who stays just gets the salary+
dividends?)

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consult_temp
removed details above. 25% gross margin tho.

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svmegatron
If I were in this position, I'd try to work something out with one or more of
the 15 staff. Those are the people most likely to be able to derive ongoing
benefit from the business.

Consulting businesses are notoriously hard to sell, the perception (rightly or
wrongly) being that a lot of the value lies in the current leadership.

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grumps
I'd agree... A phased approach is probably best but it'd be a long one.

