3 Clues It’s a Good Time To Sell Your Handmade Business for Profit

Chelsea Clarke is a Content Monetization Strategist and business broker. She helps investors acquire profitable niche online businesses, while providing an avenue for digital and handmade creators to have gainful exits from those businesses. Chelsea teaches marketing and growth-hacking strategies at HerPaperRoute, and is on a mission to help creative entrepreneurs make more paper in business. 

As creatives, we discover our place in entrepreneurship for a number of different reasons. For some of us, we are drawn to the business and marketing side first, finding a passion amongst the strategy, the numbers, and the growth-hacking involved. For others, we were drawn in by our love of what we create, the products themselves, and the business elements factor in later. 

Running a handmade business (or digital, for that matter) requires a lot of time, effort, and passion from the creator behind it. And more times than not, that once strong, fiery passion can start to dim as time goes on. Yet there comes a point in any creative entrepreneur’s journey that we need to ask ourselves, “do I need or want an exit plan?”  

Often this question isn’t considered until after something has gone wrong. Say, after you’ve experienced a poor sales season, had a personal health issue, or you’ve realized that you are experiencing burnout. That’s when you start to question if this is really the business you want to run for the rest of your life. Would you rather run a different business? Or retire from the sale of your existing business?

But burnout, hardship or loss of passion certainly aren’t the only reasons why business owners decide to sell. In fact, many creators decide to sell for positive reasons and get out while the going is good. Sell while the business is doing well, and you can walk away with a great profit, and newfound freedom to put towards your next venture. 

And some sell because that was their intention from the beginning. They developed the business for the purpose of selling it to someone else. Just like people flip houses, website flipping is a common practice too!

Truthfully, it’s never too early to have an exit plan in mind. Here are some clues that it may be the right time for you to sell, and move on from your current business.