Australian business owners can sell their business without a broker — it is entirely legal, and for smaller businesses it is sometimes the right call. You manage the valuation, the marketing, the buyer negotiation, and the due diligence yourself, supported by an accountant and a solicitor rather than a commission-based intermediary. For a business worth less than $500,000, that approach is often feasible. For a business worth $1 million or more, the gap between what a well-run sale process returns and what a DIY effort typically achieves tends to be larger than whatever you’d have paid in fees.
That’s the short answer. Here’s the longer one.
What “selling without a broker” actually means
There are three ways to sell a business in Australia: do it entirely yourself, use a business broker, or use a corporate advisor or M&A specialist. These are not the same thing, and the distinction matters.
A business broker is a commission-based agent who lists your business, markets it to their buyer database, and earns a percentage of the sale price — typically 5–10% for smaller businesses, sometimes a minimum of $15,000–$30,000 regardless of price. Brokers are appropriate for businesses under $1 million where the buyer pool is individual owner-operators and the transaction is relatively straightforward.
A corporate advisor or M&A specialist — which is what Miro Capital does — works differently. We manage the sale process, prepare the information memorandum, identify and approach strategic buyers, run a structured competitive sale, and manage the negotiation. We’re paid a fixed advisory fee plus a success component. The distinction is meaningful: a broker lists your business for any buyer; a corporate advisor runs a targeted process to find the right buyer at the best price.
Selling yourself means doing the broker’s or advisor’s job without the experience, the buyer network, or the commercial separation that comes from having someone between you and the buyer. The upside is no commission. The downside is significant: inexperienced negotiators typically leave more on the table than they save, and privately-run sales often attract lower-quality buyers.
The rule of thumb is simple: broker commissions and advisory fees are self-funding at any sale price above around $800,000, if the process is run well. Below that, the economics start to favour a private sale.
Is it legal to sell your business yourself?
Yes, completely. There is no licensing requirement for a business owner to sell their own business in Australia. You don’t need a broker’s licence. You don’t need to engage any particular intermediary.
What you do need: a solicitor to draft and review the sale agreement, an accountant to advise on the tax implications and structure, and ideally someone who has done this before to tell you when something in the deal doesn’t look right. None of those people have to be a broker.
Sole trader businesses, partnerships, companies, and trusts — all of them can be sold privately. For an asset sale (which is how most smaller businesses are structured), you’re transferring goodwill, plant and equipment, stock, and customer relationships. For a share sale, you’re selling the shares of the company directly. The asset sale vs share sale distinction affects your tax, the buyer’s risk, and how the deal is structured — get advice on this early.
How to value your business before going to market
The most important number in a private sale is the asking price — and it’s also the number most owners get wrong when they go it alone.
Australian SMEs are typically valued on a multiple of normalised EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation). For most businesses with revenue between $1M and $20M, that multiple sits between 2x and 6x depending on the industry, profitability, and how owner-dependent the business is. A plumbing business turning $300,000 annual EBITDA might be worth $750,000 to $1.2 million. A healthcare practice with $600,000 EBITDA and recurring patients could be worth $2.4 million to $4 million. The range is enormous — and overprice it by 30%, and you’ll sit on the market for twelve months while buyers wonder what’s wrong with it.
For a complete breakdown of how to get to the right number, read how to value your business for sale, or use Miro Capital’s valuation calculator to get an indicative range in five minutes.
The critical step before going to market is normalising your financials — removing personal expenses, one-off costs, and adjustments that inflate or deflate the true profit. Buyers will do this themselves during due diligence; you want to have done it first.
How to find buyers without listing with a broker
If you’re selling without a broker, you have a few options for finding buyers:
Business listing platforms — Seek Business, BizBuySell, and BusinessForSale are the main channels in Australia. You create a listing, buyers inquire, and you manage the qualification process yourself. These platforms work best for businesses under $1 million where owner-operators are the primary buyer demographic.
Direct outreach — For businesses worth $1–$20 million, the most likely buyers are not browsing listing sites. They’re competitors, suppliers, adjacent businesses, or investors who already know your industry. Identifying and approaching them confidentially — without triggering a market rumour — takes skill and sometimes relationships you don’t have yourself.
Your accountant and solicitor network — Better accountants have clients who are actively looking to acquire businesses. It’s a legitimate and often underused channel for smaller private transactions.
I spoke to a business owner in WA last year who had tried to sell her logistics business herself for eight months. She’d had plenty of inquiries off a public listing but couldn’t get any of them past the initial conversation. When she came to us, the problem was obvious within about a week: she was attracting the wrong buyers entirely (individual operators looking for a lifestyle business), and the right buyers — regional freight companies looking to add capacity in WA — weren’t seeing the listing at all because they weren’t on listing platforms. They needed to be approached directly. The business sold within four months for 22% more than her original asking price.
If confidentiality is a concern — and for most business owners it should be — listing publicly on a platform is higher risk than a targeted outreach approach.
The six steps to a private business sale
Whether you’re doing it yourself or working with an advisor, the steps are the same. The difference is who manages each one.
- Prepare your financials — three years of P&L, tax returns, and a normalised EBITDA calculation. Buyers will audit these; surprises here kill deals.
- Prepare a business summary — a document (sometimes called an information memorandum) that describes the business, its operations, financials, and the opportunity for a buyer. See the information memorandum guide for what this should include.
- Set an asking price — based on market evidence, not what you need to retire.
- Market the business — through your chosen channels, with NDAs required before sharing identifying information.
- Qualify buyers and run due diligence — this is where most private sales break down. Use the due diligence checklist to understand what buyers will ask for.
- Negotiate and execute the sale agreement — with a solicitor, not a template downloaded from the internet (I shouldn’t have to say that, but here we are).
What goes wrong when business owners sell themselves
There are four ways this typically goes sideways.
Mispricing. Owners overvalue on emotion or undervalue from impatience. A business listed $400,000 above market sits for a year and attracts no one; a business priced $300,000 below market sells in a week to someone who spotted the bargain.
No competitive tension. A private sale usually means one buyer at a time. When a buyer knows they’re the only person at the table, they negotiate differently — every problem discovered in due diligence becomes leverage to reduce the price, because you have no one to go back to.
Buyer qualification failures. Not all inquirers are serious, funded buyers. Without a proper qualification process — proof of funds, acquisition track record, signed NDA — you can spend months with a buyer who was never going to get finance approved.
Negotiation in the open. When you’re the seller negotiating directly with the buyer, you’re emotionally invested in the outcome, you have to maintain a working relationship with that person post-settlement, and you often feel pressure to make concessions that a professional intermediary would refuse on your behalf. It is very hard to negotiate hard with someone you’re also trying to reassure.
When you should use a corporate advisor instead
For businesses valued under $500,000, a private sale — or a standard business broker — is often the right choice. The transaction is relatively simple, the buyer pool is wide, and the economics of paying for a more sophisticated process don’t stack up.
For businesses worth $1 million to $20 million (and particularly above $3 million), the picture changes. You probably have a handful of genuinely strategic buyers who could pay significantly more than a generic financial buyer or owner-operator. Finding them, approaching them confidentially, and running a process that creates competitive tension between them is the difference between a fair sale and an excellent one.
That’s the work Miro Capital does. Not as a broker who lists and waits, but as an advisor who runs a structured, confidential sale process from preparation through to settlement. If you want to understand what your business might be worth and what a proper process looks like, talk to us or run the numbers yourself with the valuation calculator.