Introduction—As a step towards publicizing my book, I visited most of the business schools in the St. Louis area and a number of business-school websites around the country. With perhaps an over-abundance of optimism, I thought that a truly comprehensive instruction manual on buying and selling a business might be welcomed, especially considering the vogue of university entrepreneurship programs. Instead, I found that schools seem to be concentrating on starting a business with little concern for buying an existing business. One instructor explained that the entrepreneurship students at his school are teamed with science students aiming for high-tech startups. Another instructor said that entrepreneurship training at her school only covers writing a business plan.

No one explained why buying and selling an existing business are not covered, although a couple of instructors suggested that student enrollments seem to favor starting. Perhaps high-tech startups have more attractiveness and more potential for venture capital and eventual public offerings. There also may be some who feel that no one needs university training to buy a lowly restaurant or an even-more-lowly laundry. These are the sort of thoughts that I seem to have encountered.

So that's why I developed a case for offering a course, or at least part of a course, in buying and selling a small business, or, at the very least, for considering a book like mine for collateral reading and for the school library.

How Buying and Selling a Small Business Will Serve Business Schools and Entrepreneurship Programs—For programs that emphasize starting a business, buying an existing business provides a reasonable alternative. The idea of buying could be made a separate course—one semester hour would suffice—or it could be brought into the same course as starting. The idea of both in the same course makes sense because of the common areas of study such as qualifications for ownership, writing a business plan, obtaining bank financing, and choosing a lawyer. It also makes sense for the completeness of coverage that would result.

For students in starting a business, selling a business is the exit plan. It's the other half of the course.

If the possibility of buying a business seems unlikely, consider that there are around 18 million non-farm sole proprietorships in America and about 5 million corporations. About 98 percent of those corporations have less than 100 employees and 89 percent have less than 20 (see sba.gov/faqs). The sheer number of these businesses would seem to justify at least minimal efforts towards addressing their purchases and sales in a collegiate school of business. What's more, when the owners of these businesses want to retire—or when they find other reasons to sell—their only alternative to selling will be to close the doors and liquidate the assets. Since liquidations are both financially and esthetically unpleasant, many of these owners will be easy to negotiate with. Thus, there are bargains out there waiting to be bought. For some of the students, buying an existing business, especially at a bargain price, may be the only way for a person with an entrepreneurial bent to become an entrepreneur.

For business programs in general—regardless of whether entrepreneurship studies are included—a study of buying and selling a small business would round out the students' knowledge for a broader perspective. It would also open their eyes to other possibilities. That, after all, is one of the reasons for going to school. (I wish someone had told me about other possibilities when I was in school. I believe that, in the earlier years of my career, my sense of direction, my productivity, and my happiness would have been much improved.)

If a business school would develop a course around this book, it could serve as an elective for majors in liberal arts, journalism, accounting, law, industrial psychology, industrial engineering, and so on. It would also make a fine elective for business majors not pursuing entrepreneurship. For students who become lawyers, accountants, or bankers, the course would help them guide their future clients through the daunting challenges of buying and selling a business. And for colleges and universities offering training in real estate agency, buying and selling a business would complement the curriculum.

If a course in buying and selling would for some reason be deemed inappropriate for a collegiate school of business—and, if that were the case, I would dearly like to know why—it could be added to an existing adult education program, or reduced to a topic within an existing course.

If you feel that the university is an inappropriate venue for training to buy a restaurant or any other business perceived as mundane, please visit my page telling about buying a business versus starting one. There you may be surprised to learn that the difficulties of buying and selling a business are on a par with those of starting. Moreover, the fundamentals of buying and selling apply to high-tech businesses as well as to low-tech, and to everything in between. Thus, a study of buying and selling a business would seem as appropriate to the university as starting one.

If the schemes business owners use to cheat on taxes—a necessary topic when dealing with business purchases and sales—seem too rank for the university classroom, please know that the majority of the owners are doing it. A business school, therefore, that graduates students without telling them how to deal with it is not quite fulfilling its responsibility. My book tells exactly what to do. (It does so mostly in the comfortable disguise of fiction by describing, in detail, the purchase and sale of the Acme Widget Corporation.) If you still don't feel you can bring this topic into the classroom—which, by the way, I did for 16 years at St. Louis Community College—then you can at least place a copy of Buying and Selling a Small Business into the school library. Then the students will at least have a chance to discover for themselves what's going on in the real world.

I believe that almost any good teacher could develop a course by using my book. But if getting someone to teach the course is a problem, a sharp business broker would probably be pleased to do it on a part-time basis. (When I was in college, several of our instructors were part-time faculty hired for their specific knowledge in the field. They were also some of our best teachers.)

On a different tack, perhaps it will help to consider that a course (or a book) in buying and selling a small business is more than a list of instructions for an everyday, marketplace procedure. It is a microcosm of life. It tells about sizing up one's abilities, then searching for one's desires. It tells how to dig for the facts and to appraise the result. It tells how to negotiate the price and terms. Actually, it tells how to negotiate almost anything. It tells how to preserve human dignity, even the dignity of one's adversaries, and why that is important. It gives tips about managing which are useful whether as a business owner, as a corporate executive or, would you believe, as a housewife. It tells how to get a bank loan. How to choose a lawyer or an accountant. How to do the right thing as in the 1989 movie of similar title. It tells about Maslow's Hierarchy of human needs and the basic stuff of happiness. It even tells how to answer the telephone, and why that is important.

Buying and Selling a Small Business tells all of the above and it does so with a quality of presentation befitting a university. Although this book is very basic and not at all scholarly, it is loaded with common sense based on experience in the marketplace and, in many places, with analytical depth. That's why it belongs in a university.

Now I want to say thank you for your time and effort in reading this web page. If you have questions, please contact me and I'll do my best to answer them.

Ernest J. Honigmann