Selling your Business? The 12 Minutes Every Business Owner Should Listen To Before They Sell

Dan Ahchow
1 day ago
3 min read

There is a wave coming through the commercial services industry, and most operators are not pricing it in yet.

A huge slice of Australia's commercial cleaning and facilities management businesses are owned by founders in their 50s, 60s and 70s. They built real books of work over decades. Now they are thinking about the back nine: who buys the business, what it is worth, and how much of the cheque they actually keep.

If that is you, or it is going to be you in the next five years, there is a podcast worth your time.

Meet Jamie Spence

Jamie Spence is a senior advisor and non-executive board director who has spent his career working with private companies across Australia and Asia. He hosts a podcast called Private n Listed, where he breaks down the real mechanics of buying and selling privately held businesses. No jargon for the sake of it. No fluff. Just the stuff that actually moves the number on the contract.

We came across his work recently and could not stop nodding along, because he is talking directly to our world.

The episode we loved

Episode 4 is called "Like for Like businesses in Baby Boomer Sales and Acquisitions", and Jamie uses facilities management businesses as his worked example. It runs about 12 minutes. You will not get those 12 minutes back, but you will not want to.

Two things in it stood out to us.

One: a tax change that quietly resets the clock.

Jamie opens with the Federal Government's move to wind back Capital Gains Tax exemptions on future growth for businesses that pre-date 1985, taking effect from 1 July 2027. This hits businesses held by individuals, trusts and partnerships. A lot of long-standing cleaning and FM operators are structured exactly this way. If you have been sitting on a business for thirty years assuming the goalposts would never move, this episode is your nudge to go and check the field markings.

Two: why "like for like" buyers change everything.

Jamie explains the difference between selling to a financial buyer and selling to someone already in your industry. A "like for like" acquirer (another operator, a consolidator, a competitor with a war chest) sees value you cannot see in your own business: route density, contract overlap, supplier leverage, a team they do not have to rebuild. That is who pays a premium. Understanding how those buyers think is the difference between a fair price and a great one.

Why this matters if you run on Eaco

Commercial cleaning is one of the most fragmented industries in the country, which is exactly why consolidation is heating up. The operators who win the sale are the ones who can hand a buyer a clean, organised, defensible business. Documented compliance. Clear records. Forms and checklists that prove the work was done to standard, every site, every shift.

That is the boring back-office stuff that turns into real money at exit. It is also, not coincidentally, what we built Eaco to handle.

You do not need to be selling tomorrow to think like this. The best time to make your business sellable is years before you sell it.