Someone’s made an offer for your business. Their number is an anchor, not a verdict.

It usually arrives without warning. An email, a LinkedIn message, a quiet word from a competitor or a private-equity scout: we’d be interested in acquiring your business. Sometimes a number follows immediately; sometimes it comes a meeting or two later. Either way, the approach is flattering — someone has looked at what you built and decided they want it.

That feeling is exactly where owners get into trouble. Because the figure a buyer puts in front of you is not a verdict on what your business is worth. It is an opening position, built from their interests — and the moment you treat it as the truth, you have handed them control of the negotiation.

Their number is built from their model, not your business

A serious acquirer arrives with a figure already worked out. But that figure answers their question, not yours: how little can we pay and still get this deal done? It is shaped by their model, their cost of capital, their assumptions about your future, and how badly they want what you have.

Crucially, it may have very little to do with your business’s standalone value. A buyer might offer well below fair value, hoping you have never worked out your own number and will accept theirs. Or they might offer above a standalone value — because to them, your business is worth more than it is to you: your customers plug a gap in their market, your team or your systems remove years of build time, or buying you takes a competitor off the board. That extra is strategic value, and a share of it rightly belongs to you. If you do not know it exists, you will never negotiate for it.

Either way, you cannot tell which situation you are in — generous, fair or insulting — unless you have an independent number of your own to measure their offer against.

Why the first number quietly wins

There is a well-documented reason the opening offer matters so much: anchoring. Once a figure is on the table, every subsequent discussion organises itself around it. Counter-offers move up or down from that anchor, not from some neutral starting point. The buyer knows this. It is why they are comfortable naming a number first.

If you walk into that conversation with nothing but a rough feel for what the business is worth, you are negotiating inside their framework. You can haggle — but you are haggling around their figure, conceding from a position you never chose. The gap between an anchored offer and a defensible value is routinely 20 to 40 percent. On a business worth R4 million, that is R800 000 to R1.6 million that simply never enters the conversation, because you had no reason to ask for it.

The information trap

There is a second risk in an unsolicited approach, and it has nothing to do with price. To make an offer real, a buyer will ask for information — financials, customer detail, contracts, margins. The instinct, flattered and eager, is to open the books and show how good the business is.

Resist it. Not every approach is a genuine buyer. Some are competitors using a soft “acquisition interest” to gather intelligence they could never get otherwise — your customer concentration, your pricing, your weak points. Even with a sincere buyer, over-sharing early weakens you: it hands them every value-destroyer to negotiate against before you have established what the business is actually worth.

The discipline is straightforward: share only what a serious buyer genuinely needs to model a fair deal, and stage it behind a signed confidentiality agreement. A valuation done properly tells you, in advance, which weaknesses a buyer will target — so you can address them, or at least see them coming, rather than discovering them mid-negotiation.

What to do before the second meeting

The single most useful thing you can do after an approach is also the least dramatic: get your own independent number before you respond in earnest.

An independent valuation gives you three things the buyer would rather you did not have. It tells you your standalone value — the floor below which any offer is simply poor. It surfaces the drivers a strategic buyer is really paying for, so you can argue for a share of that value rather than giving it away. And it gives you a documented figure that did not come from the person trying to buy you — a number you can hold the line on, because you can explain exactly how it was built.

With that in hand, the conversation changes. You are no longer reacting to their offer; you are testing their offer against yours. You negotiate from your number instead of theirs.

The honest version

An approach can be a real opportunity, and the right answer is sometimes to engage seriously and sell well. The point is not to be suspicious of every buyer — it is to make sure that when you sit down across the table, the number in the room is one you chose: documented, independent and defensible, not one handed to you by the party with the most to gain from your not knowing better.

And the approach itself creates urgency — they might lose interest, better move quickly. That urgency works for the buyer, not for you. There is almost always time to know your number first.

If someone has approached you, the most valuable hour you can spend is working out what your business is actually worth before you answer them. Send me the details of your situation — the first conversation is free, and there is no obligation either way.