What Brokers Don’t Do
While we do take pride in providing our customers with peace of mind in a business transaction, there are limits to what we can do. In this article we’ll cover a few of those limits (and what resources you can lean on instead).
We’re Not Attorneys
While all of us have looked at more contracts than almost anyone who is not an attorney, we still don’t function as an attorney when we are your broker. We’re not going to bill you by the hour, and we’re always happy to look at some wording you might be puzzling over, but we have a solid list of attorneys who have experience in dealing with business transactions, not someone who’s your friend’s brother’s cousin who does property law.
While your attorney is someone you pay, like us, to advise you on the deal, beware of those who try to take control of the deal. We’ve seen more business sales flame out for this reason than any other. If you don’t manage your attorney, you will get managed instead.
It’s Not Our Decision
Outside of buying a home, this is often the single largest financial transaction our clients go through, and they often look to us for advice. We can’t tell you how often we’ve heard, “Which deal would you take” or “What would you do”? We always try to reframe this by reminding the client that it doesn’t matter what we would do, it matters what they want. We can only provide context and experience, but ultimately, accepting a deal is never going to be our decision.
A classic example of this is on price. If there’s a gap between what the buyer is offering and what the seller wants, and if we’ve already done the work on valuation, we will accept if the seller wants to wait for more money. That means the buying window may likely lengthen, but if the amount is significant enough, and the seller is not in a rush, this may make a lot of sense. In any case, we’re never going to tell a client to take an offer (or to refuse one). Again, our goal is always to advise and be part of the dream team that brings all this together.
We Don’t Focus on Specific Buyers
Our job is to facilitate meetings with different buyers (who may come from a range of backgrounds) but we are representing you, not them. They may have engaged a broker to help them purchase a business, and that broker may even be one of our colleagues, but our job is not to help our colleague close the deal his customer wants, but to make sure our client engages with the buyer he/she is most aligned with, and we’re always going to bring our clients back to the original goals and values they enunciated at their first meetings with us to offer perspective on what to do in a given situation.
So there are three things we don’t do. If you want a reminder of the many things we do, do, check out our Day in the Life article.
