Six Things You Can Do Now to Prepare to Sell Your Pawn Shop

Selling your pawn shop isn’t just about selling a storefront: it’s about making good on all of the hard work you’ve put into your independent pawn business over the years.

A lot of pawn shop owners dread the idea of selling their pawn businesses because they anticipate that the process will be unpleasant, but the truth is that selling a pawn business doesn’t have to be a long, grueling, unpleasant process. In fact, selling your pawn business can be one of the most satisfying things you do in your long career as a pawn broker, provided that you prepare appropriately and obtain the right representation prior to beginning the selling process.

Here are six things you can do (in addition to obtaining the right exit strategy consultant) to make your pawn business attractive to buyers and ensure that your closing will go smoothly—long before you actually put your pawn business on the market:

1. Establish a history of profitably through smart accounting and good, monthly record keeping.
2. Track the numbers of long-term and short-term customer relationships you typically maintain.
3. Determine your competitive advantages, including those that have to do with location and licenses, and put down on paper the things that make your pawn shop or shops unique.
4. Think about the opportunities for growth you’ve considered in the past and how a buyer might be able to take advantages of the opportunities that you, for whatever reasons, did or did not implement. Relay these potential opportunities to your pawn shop exit strategy consultant.
5. Make a list of the things you could do to improve your pawn business affordably and then start checking off the items on your list one by one. Are there simple repairs you could make? Are there partnership or investor relationships that you could improve or dissolve prior to closing that would make selling easier?  Strategies you could deploy, but have been putting off?
6. Have your accountant and/or exit strategy consultant go over your profit and loss statements, balance sheets, recent tax returns, tangible and intangible assets, inventory, existing contracts, and property or lease agreements.

Undertaking the tasks outlined above may seem incredibly burdensome, but if you start hacking away at them early on, they don’t have to be thorns in your side. In fact, they may even enable you to run your business more smoothly and obtain higher profits even as you prepare to sell your pawnshop.