Selling a small business can be an extremely difficult process for entrepreneurs.

“The things that people don’t know about getting through a [merger] and [acquisition] process or selling their business are generally the more technical aspects,” said Kevin DeSanto of KippsDeSanto & Co.

The financial and legal terms can be foreign at first and require time for company leaders to understand a process that can get drawn out, DeSanto said.

“You’ve been your own boss for a long period of time. That can be a very, very challenging dynamic for people to go through,” he said.

While there’s a lot of talk about mergers in the business community, they’re actually quite rare. “Less than one percent of all conversations that are started around M&A actually turn into a transaction,” DeSanto told What’s Working in Washington.

“It usually takes multiple rounds of discussions, multiple parties to come to the table.”

One of the most important parts of making sure a deal actually takes place is the disclosure of information.

“Deals get done when people trust each other… what we see as one of the critical failures is disclosing pieces of information, or disclosing information on a piecemeal basis, and not being up front or transparent about the entire scope of the business,” DeSanto said.

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