What each option really means
Selling now means taking your business to market as it stands and accepting the price the market puts on it today. The offer is real and the timeline is short: you either agree a deal on roughly current terms or you do not. What you cannot change is the state of the business a buyer is valuing, including any owner dependence, thin margins or undocumented processes that surface in due diligence.
Waiting to sell means giving yourself two to three years to raise your 7 Mills score first, then going to market from a stronger position. The point is not delay for its own sake; it is fixing the specific weaknesses that hold down the multiple and frighten buyers late in a deal: reducing your personal involvement, cleaning up the numbers, documenting how the business runs, improving the quality of revenue and strengthening the management team. Done well, that lifts two things at once, the multiple a buyer will pay and the odds the deal completes at all.
The honest catch is that waiting only pays if you actually do the work. Waiting passively, hoping the market rises, is the worst of both: you carry two to three more years of market and personal risk without the improvement that was meant to justify the wait.
When selling now fits
Selling now tends to be the right call when the business is already in reasonable shape and the gains left on the table are marginal. If your score is decent, further preparation may add less than the market movement, rule changes or life events you expose yourself to by waiting.
It also fits when the timing is set by something other than valuation. Health, burnout, a partnership breaking up, or a strong unsolicited approach from a credible buyer can all make today the right day to sell, even if in a perfect world another year of work would have helped. A firm offer in hand is worth a great deal more than a better offer you might earn later.
And it fits when the market is clearly in your favour and you are ready to move. Buyer appetite and sector multiples run in cycles you do not control, so a strong market plus a business that is good enough can beat a stronger business sold into a weaker one.
When waiting pays, and when it just delays
Waiting pays most when your current score is low and the weaknesses are specific and fixable. Owner dependence is the clearest example: a business that cannot run a fortnight without you is discounted heavily and prone to collapsing in diligence, and it is often the single most improvable thing. The same logic applies to messy accounts or a business with no documented process. Where the problem is concrete and within your control, two to three years of focused work can change both the price and the completion odds materially.
Waiting rarely pays when the ceiling is structural rather than fixable: a business whose value is capped by its market, a single dominant customer you cannot diversify away, or a sector in long decline. In those cases more time mostly buys more risk.
Two things sit outside this decision and deserve their own advice. The market may turn while you wait, which is the genuine cost of the waiting option; weigh it against the fact that the improvement lever, unlike the market, is yours to pull. And the tax and legal treatment of a sale differs by country and changes over time, with the timing of a sale sometimes interacting with reliefs and thresholds; take country-specific advice before you fix a date, because the when can matter as much as the how.