In the not too distant past, selling a restaurant company was often simple and quick. Over 15 years of experience, we have seen the process of selling a business become progressively more difficult, complex and time-consuming as the size and sophistication of the franchise industry has changed so dramatically.
Hey, this is Rick Ormsby on Unbridled Capital. In a previous episode, I was talking about the process and the importance of process and selling a franchise business. And we talked about how much it's changed over the years as more sophisticated capital and processes have come into the franchise space. And we talked too about the importance of knowing and really knowing well the value of your business.
Today, I wanted to talk about the rest of the process of selling a company. And so the first step is to identify who the buyers are and the buyers have changed over the years. It used to be that you might sell something to a neighboring franchisee who you've known for 30 years, but anymore on the deals that we're doing, we see buyers all over the country from different states, different nationalities, different sizes, different brand focus, different capital interests going and looking at acquiring these franchise brands in these individual geographies. So the buying market has changed in identifying and reaching that network of buyers is a critical component of selling your business.
The next step that we do in our company is help put together a book, a marketing book or a confidential information memorandum. And we use that as a document, the defining document in marketing the business for sale so that buyers know all the financial and operational details of selling a company like this and owning a company like this. We put a process in place where buyers make offers and along with their offers, they tell their financing capabilities and how they can get approved by the brand to be able to effectuate the transaction. And then after that, we take these offers to the seller and they make a decision on who they want to go to the dance with.
And once a buyer and seller have come together on pricing and general terms, I've found over the years and our companies found that, that the back-end of the process of selling a company, which is everything from buyer and seller meetings and due diligence to making sure that there's assurances, that the financing will get completed and the franchise or we'll approve the transaction that 90 to 150 days of time to get the deal closed is very complex. It requires a lot of patience and expertise, and it is increasingly becoming the place where deals fall apart.
And so in that case, I would tell you that expertise is really needed to reduce the risk of a seller getting a successful deal closed and that's what we do at our company. And if you have any interest in learning more about it, we'd be happy to talk about it, give us call.