Your Broker Is Doing Ten Jobs at Once. That Is Why Selling Takes So Long.
What One Broker Doing Everything Actually Costs You
Three things, and none of them are obvious from the outside.
It is slower. A broker writing your listing copy is not calling buyers that afternoon. A broker in a negotiation is not appraising the next business. Work queues up behind whichever task is loudest, and the quiet task is almost always yours.
The marketing is weaker. Business brokers are not copywriters. Most are good at deals and average at describing a business in a way that makes a buyer pick up the phone. When the listing is written by whoever happens to be holding the file, quality depends entirely on that individual's writing ability.
It costs more. Traditional broker commissions in Australia typically run 8 to 10%. On top of that, most charge an upfront marketing fee, usually somewhere between $4,000 and $6,000, payable whether or not the business ever sells. Minimum commission clauses of $15,000 to $30,000 are also standard, which means that below a certain sale price the percentage becomes irrelevant. You pay the minimum regardless.
That is what inefficiency costs. You are not paying for rare expertise. You are paying for a structure nobody has bothered to redesign.
What We Built Instead
We broke the job into its parts and gave each one to people who do only that.
Appraisal. Renee Mclean leads our listings and appraisals team. Working out what a business is realistically worth is its own discipline, and it's the decision every other decision depends on. It is not something to squeeze in between inspections.
Onboarding and marketing. April, Bronte and Jacob are onboarding specialists and copywriters. They prepare the marketing materials and business profiles. That is their job, every day, on every listing. Not a broker's side task.
Selling. Our brokers negotiate and sell. That is what they do with their time, because the appraisal is done, the marketing is done, and the file is ready before it reaches them.
Transactions and settlement. Brokers like Lizzie, Simon, Renee Conlon and Tim specialise in getting complex deals over the line. The stretch between accepted offer and settled contract is where sales quietly fall over, and it needs someone whose actual specialty it is.
Behind all of it sits Demelza on systems, Leila on finance and appraisal operations, and Nigel across compliance.
Nobody on that list is doing ten jobs. Everybody is doing one.
What Changes When You Do It That Way
Three things, and they are the same three from earlier, reversed.
It’s faster, because tasks run in parallel rather than queuing behind one person. It markets better, because the listing is written by someone who writes listings for a living. And it costs less, because a specialised process is more efficient than a generalist one, and we hand that saving to the seller rather than keeping it.
We charge 4%.
That number gets attention, and it should, because it's roughly a third of what a small business seller commonly pays. But the fee is not the clever part. The fee is what falls out of the structure. We are not undercutting the market by absorbing a loss. We are charging less because it genuinely costs us less to do the work properly.
One Thousand Businesses In
We have sold more than 1,000 businesses and we take over 1,000 buyer enquiries a week across Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.
That enquiry volume is the part we would point to first. A business sells when the right buyer sees it, and how many buyers see it comes down to how well it was marketed and how widely. It is the clearest evidence that the specialist model does what we built it to do.
One of our sellers put it better than our marketing does. Dani sold her business within two months and left a review that ends: "Red hot tip, don't close your business down, get Bonza to sell it for you."
Why This Matters Now
Australia is entering the biggest handover of small business ownership it has seen.
More than 500,000 businesses are owned by people aged 60 or older, and 48% of Baby Boomer owners plan to exit within one to five years. Only 16% of those retiring have a documented succession plan, and close to half of all owners considering an exit have no plan at all.
A third intend to live on the proceeds.
Those owners are about to walk into an industry built around the broker rather than around them, and pay ten per cent for the privilege. Some will get a good outcome. Plenty will wait too long, market badly, and accept less than the business was worth because the process wore them down.
Where We Stand
We do not think one broker doing everything is a mark of service. We think it is a structure that has never been examined, and sellers have been paying for it for decades.
Faster, better, smarter is not a slogan we put on the wall. It is the three things that change when you stop asking one person to do ten jobs.
If you are thinking about selling, start with what your business is actually worth. Our free appraisal will tell you, and our guide to selling a business in Australia walks through what happens next.
No obligation, and no $4,000 upfront.
