Why You Need Patience in Selling Your Business

Every morning, partners Kirk Barnett and Dennis Adkins stood witness to the success of their former bakery/restaurant, Dulce, as tables were filled one by one and the queue of people at the cashier gradually reached the door.

For the partners who were used to starting each day with a full house, business is good and life is as sweet as Dulce’s handmade pastries. So when it came time to sell their well-loved Santa Fe-based restaurant in 2016, their line of thinking was, “Who wouldn’t want to buy this business?”

Although the business was enjoying steady revenue growth since its inception in 2010, Kirk and Dennis soon realized that not everybody shared their dream of running a successful restaurant. Locals might be eager to whet their appetites with Dulce’s artisan bread and award-winning quiche, but most of them were not eager to purchase and operate the restaurant themselves.

“This whole process took longer than we had thought… I think what we realized is that not everybody wants to do this for a living firstly in a town like Santa Fe,” Kirk recalled.

The former owners found out that there was more to selling a business than putting a profitable, established restaurant in the market.

“We just learned that it takes a lot of patience and a lot of starts and stops to go through this process,” Kirk said.