The March Group

The upshot of this is that I don’t necessarily believe that what they say isn’t true, it’s what they *don’t* say that’s the big difference. Unfortunately we found that out after investing a certain amount of money. I’m leaving the dollar amount out because it really doesn’t change any part of this review.
At first, they wanted an amount to start the process of valuing the business and start the sale process. It was only after many conversations with them that as we didn’t know what the value would come out as, we didn’t know if we wanted to commit to the sale process.
Eventually they said they had program where you pay half the amount and they do everything except the selling process. And this is example of not giving us all the information. They first tried to get the maximum amount of money, it was only after we kept repeating ourselves that we didn’t want to jump in blind with so much money that they then offered another existing program. This took about a week of back and forth calls.
Second, their process of valuing the business seems logical enough. In fact, I’ve been to two different presentations– one from the March Group and one from another company and both had the same information.
Again, the problem was what they didn’t say. Based on their equations, we had a general idea of what our business was worth. And I mean general. Taking all of the emotion out of it and running based on pure numbers we had an idea of what to expect.
When we finally got their report, the value ended up being a good 40% of what it should have been based on what they taught us. Their explanation was to say that since our business was in a certain sector, it has more risk along with some other reasons. Ah, but you never mentioned that in your full day seminar. And as it was way low, there was no way we were taking it to market. And looking back to my first point, it’s a good thing we didn’t spend the full amount they wanted.
I’m not going to go so far to say that it’s a scam– although based on research I’ve done, others disagree. But it is important to realize that although they may be telling you the truth in everything they say, that doesn’t mean that you’ll get anywhere near the results you expect.
If you want to sell your business, I would suggest a place which does not take any money up front. Forget the «getting some skin in the game» line or anything else they say. If a company truly believes that they can sell you and make money off of it, they should be able to do it for pure commission.