Selling Your Accounting Practice
Without a Broker
Not every practice sale needs a broker. The ones that don't still need everything a broker would do.
Some of the practitioners who ring me about selling are running a firm I will not take to market. Their fee base is too small for a brokerage engagement to make commercial sense — for them or for me. I tell them so early in the call. That does not mean they are on their own. It means the sale is theirs to run, and it needs to be run with the same structure a broker would bring to it.
- Some accounting practices are too small for a brokerage engagement to make commercial sense, which can leave their owners running a six-figure transaction with no process behind them.
- The decisions that destroy value in a practice sale are almost always the early ones — pricing without a benchmark, releasing information before a confidentiality agreement is signed, and telling staff at the wrong moment.
- A seller running their own transaction still needs the documents a broker would use: an information memorandum, a confidentiality agreement, an offer structure, and a due diligence checklist.
- Below roughly a million dollars in annual fees, a well-prepared DIY sale is a sound proposition. Above that figure, what a broker adds to the final price generally exceeds what a broker costs.
What happens next is the part that concerns me. Those practitioners go away and sell the practice anyway. They have to. They are sixty-three, or their health has changed, or a competitor down the road has made an approach and they want to know whether it is a fair number. So they run the transaction themselves, using whatever they can find, and they make the same handful of expensive mistakes. The names change. The mistakes generally do not.
For Australian accounting practices, selling without a broker is a well-trodden path at the smaller end of the market. The question is not whether it can be done — it is done every year, successfully — but whether it is done with a process or without one.
Sell or Buy a Practice Without a Broker: the Complete Toolkit
Everything a broker would work from, so you can run the transaction yourself and run it properly. Drawn from the session I run for practitioners, recorded in full.
- The 1hr 50min recorded briefing
- The transaction process, mapped step by step
- Information memorandum template
- Offer template
- Confidentiality agreement
- Due diligence checklist
- Client and staff communication guide
- Full slide deck with speaker notes
- Financing segment from Hyaline Finance
Immediate access on purchase, yours to keep. Add a one-hour consultation with Michelle at checkout if you want a view on your own practice.
Before You Sell Your Accounting Practice
What drives value in a practice, what buyers examine, and the questions to settle before you go anywhere near the market. The right first step whether you end up selling yourself or engaging a broker.
Request the GuideSent to your inbox. No cost, no obligation.
You run the transaction
- You control the timing, the disclosure and the negotiation
- No commission on the sale price
- You carry the preparation, the paperwork and the buyer search
- Works best on smaller, single-principal practices with a likely buyer already in view
A broker runs it for you
- Access to a buyer network you cannot reach on your own
- Competitive tension between multiple interested parties
- Someone else absorbs the negotiation and the confidentiality risk
- Justified where the fee base, partner structure or buyer pool makes the difference material
Buy just the part you are missing
Information Memorandum Template
The document buyers ask for first. Twelve sections, unbranded. Already included in the toolkit.
View template
DIY Practice Listing
Your practice in front of registered buyers, while you keep control of the sale.
View listingNobody sells a practice twice
You have priced hundreds of businesses for your clients. You have written the tax advice on dozens of sales. And when it comes to your own firm, you will do this exactly once, with no benchmark, no comparable transactions, and a great deal of emotion attached to a number that represents thirty years of work.
That is the structural problem with a DIY practice sale. It is not a lack of intelligence. It is a lack of repetition. A buyer who has acquired four practices has seen the pattern four times. You are seeing it for the first time, and you are seeing it from the inside, where objectivity is hardest.
The consequence shows up in the price, but it starts much earlier than the price. It starts with what you send a prospective buyer, when you send it, and what you have asked them to sign first.
A practice sale is not a negotiation. It is a preparation exercise with a negotiation at the end of it.
The seven jobs a broker actually does
If you are going to do this without a broker, it helps to be precise about what a broker does, because the fee is not for making introductions. It is for these seven things. Every one of them still has to happen. The only question is who does it.
Seven questions to settle first
What is the practice actually worth? Not what you would like, and not what the practitioner at the golf club told you he got.
What are you selling? Fee base, entity, premises, staff, the work in progress, your ongoing involvement — each is a separate decision with a separate price.
How will you present it? A buyer needs an information memorandum that answers their questions before they ask, or they will assume the worst about anything missing.
Who is going to buy it? If your answer is "the firm across the road," you have a buyer pool of one, and they know it.
What do they sign before they see anything? A confidentiality agreement, executed, before a single client number leaves your office.
How will the offer be structured? Retention clauses, transition period, restraint, payment terms. The headline figure is often the least important part.
When and how do you tell your staff and your clients? This one decision moves more value than most of the others combined.
Answer those seven properly and you have replaced most of what a broker contributes on a smaller transaction. Skip any of them and you will find out which one you skipped, usually somewhere around the due diligence stage, when the buyer starts revising their offer downwards.
Four failure points I see repeatedly
Talking before the agreement is signed
A prospective buyer rings, sounds credible, and asks for the client list and last year's figures. The seller sends them. There is no confidentiality agreement in place. Six weeks later the approach goes quiet, and a competitor knows the fee base, the top clients and the staff structure of a firm that is now visibly for sale. That information does not come back.
Pricing off a rule of thumb
Multiples circulate in this profession like folklore. They are anchored to transactions that are years old, in different markets, with different fee compositions and different client demographics. A practice with concentrated revenue in a handful of ageing clients is not the same asset as one with a broad base and a next-generation client wave, and it should not carry the same multiple.
Telling the team at the wrong moment
Staff find out through a rumour rather than from you, and two of them start taking calls from recruiters within a fortnight. A buyer paying for a practice is paying for continuity. Every departure between handshake and settlement is a reason to reprice.
Leaving the structure to the lawyers at the end
Restraint, retention, transition and payment terms are commercial decisions dressed up as legal ones. If the first time you consider them is when the contract is being drafted, you are negotiating from a position you have already given away.
Get the confidentiality agreement sorted before you speak to anyone
Of the four failures above, this is the one with no remedy. The others cost you money. This one costs you control of information about your own firm, permanently.
Before you respond to a single approach, have a confidentiality agreement ready to send, and make signing it the precondition for anything beyond a general conversation. Not a handshake. A signature.
Finding a buyer is harder than running the sale
Most sellers who come to me having tried it themselves did not fail on the paperwork. They failed on the buyer pool. They approached two firms they knew, both said no or offered poorly, and the process stopped there.
I see this more often than you would think. By the time they ring me, they have often already shown their figures to the most obvious buyer in town — and told that buyer, without meaning to, that there is nobody else at the table.
A practice is worth what a competitive market will pay, and a market of two is not a market. You do not need a broker to run the transaction. You do need visibility to people who are actively looking, and those people are not reading your local paper.
That gap — needing access to buyers without needing a broker to run the whole transaction — is why we built the DIY Practice Listing. You keep control of the sale and write your own advertisement. We publish it on the Rob Knights Practice Broking website and send it out by listing alert email to buyers who have registered with us because they are looking.
Listings stay live until sold and edits are free. Every one includes a consultation with me before it goes out, because a poorly positioned listing will attract the wrong enquiries and waste your time. If you would rather not draft the advertisement or the confidentiality agreement yourself, both are available as add-ons, along with a feature in our monthly newsletter.
The buyer is not paying for what you built. They are paying for what they believe will still be there in two years.
When you should not do this yourself
I sell practices for a living, so treat what follows with the scepticism it deserves. It is still true.
A brokered sale generally produces a better result than a self-managed one. Not because the paperwork is better, but because a broker creates competition, and competition sets the price. When three qualified buyers are interested at the same time, the number moves. When one buyer knows they are the only one at the table, it moves the other way.
Where the line sits
As a rough guide: if your practice turns over under about a million dollars in annual fees, you are a single principal, and the transaction is reasonably clean, running it yourself with proper structure behind you is a defensible decision.
Above that, or where there are multiple partners, equity to unwind, work in progress to value, a lease or premises complication, or a real risk that word getting out would damage the firm — the difference a broker makes to the final price usually exceeds the fee by a comfortable margin. That is not a marketing claim. It is what competitive tension does to a number.
The figure is a guide, not a rule. You know your practice better than any threshold does.
If you are somewhere near that line and genuinely unsure, that is worth a short conversation rather than a guess. It costs nothing to find out which side of it you sit on, and it is a far cheaper enquiry than discovering the answer after settlement.
Three steps, in this order
If you have decided to run your own sale, do not start by contacting buyers. Start here.
Step one — read the Seller's Guide
Before You Sell Your Accounting Practice sets out what drives value in a practice, what buyers examine, and the questions to settle before you go anywhere near the market. It is the right first step whether you end up selling yourself or engaging a broker.
Step two — get the process and the documents
The Sell or Buy a Practice Without a Broker toolkit is the session I run for practitioners, recorded in full, together with the documents I would use if I were acting for you. It covers the transaction process end to end, and includes a segment from John Bownas of Hyaline Finance on what lenders are looking for when a buyer seeks funding — because a deal that cannot be financed is not a deal.
If you already know your process and only need the one document buyers ask for first, the Information Memorandum Template is available on its own. Twelve sections, built from the questions purchasers actually raise, in the order they raise them. It is also included in the complete toolkit, so there is no need to buy both.
Years advising Australian accounting practices on value, structure and succession
Practice valuations completed — the evidence base behind how we price a firm
Components in the toolkit, including every template a broker would work from
Inside it you get the recorded briefing, a step-by-step map of the transaction process, an information memorandum template, an offer template, a ready-to-use confidentiality agreement, a due diligence checklist that works from either side of the table, a client and staff communication guide with sample letters, the full slide deck with speaker notes, and the finance segment. The documents are unbranded beyond the cover page, so you can present them as your own.
No-nonsense, factual and, refreshingly, not a sales pitch. A good mix of facts and experience-based tips.
A Dandenong practitioner · attendeeStep three — put it in front of buyers
When your information memorandum is written and your confidentiality agreement is ready, list the practice. The DIY Practice Listing puts it on the Rob Knights Practice Broking website and into the inbox of buyers who have registered with us specifically because they are looking.
Contact Michelle for a 15-minute call
If you are weighing up whether to sell your practice yourself or have it brokered, a short conversation will settle it. I will tell you plainly which I think is right for your firm, including when the answer is that you do not need me.
Book a 15-minute callFifteen minutes, at no cost and no obligation. For a detailed view on your own practice, add a one-hour consultation when you buy the toolkit.
Selling an accounting practice without a broker
Can I sell my accounting practice without a broker?
Yes, and many practitioners do. It works best on smaller, single-principal practices where the transaction is straightforward. What determines the outcome is whether you run a proper process — a defensible price, a confidentiality agreement signed before anything is released, an information memorandum that answers a buyer's questions, and a clear position on offer structure. Sellers who do those things get sound results. Sellers who improvise generally do not.
What documents do I need to sell an accounting practice myself?
At minimum: a confidentiality agreement for prospective buyers to sign, an information memorandum presenting the practice, a due diligence checklist so you know what will be requested, and an offer template covering price, retention, restraint, transition and payment terms. You will also want a written plan for how and when you communicate with staff and clients. The Sell or Buy a Practice Without a Broker toolkit contains all of these as templates you can adapt.
Do I need a confidentiality agreement before releasing information?
Always, and before anything at all is released. Once a prospective buyer has your client numbers, fee composition and staff structure, that information cannot be recovered if the approach comes to nothing. Make a signed confidentiality agreement the precondition for any discussion beyond generalities. This is the single failure point in a self-managed sale that has no remedy afterwards.
How do I find a buyer if I am not using a broker?
This is the hardest part of a DIY sale, and it is where most self-managed processes stall. Approaching one or two firms you already know gives you a buyer pool too small to create any competition on price. The DIY Practice Listing publishes your practice on the Rob Knights Practice Broking website and distributes it by alert email to buyers registered with us, while you retain full control of the sale. Optional add-ons cover professional advertisement copywriting, a confidentiality agreement drafted for your practice, and a feature in our monthly newsletter.
What is included in the Sell or Buy a Practice Without a Broker toolkit?
The toolkit contains the full recorded briefing, the transaction process map, an information memorandum template, an offer template, a confidentiality agreement, a due diligence checklist, a client and staff communication guide with sample letters, the complete slide deck with speaker notes, and a finance segment from John Bownas of Hyaline Finance. Access is immediate on purchase and the documents are yours to keep. It is licensed to the purchasing individual or firm for use in their own transaction.
When is it worth engaging a broker instead of selling the practice myself?
As a general guide, once annual fees move beyond about a million dollars, or where there are multiple partners, equity to unwind, significant work in progress, or a genuine confidentiality risk, a brokered sale usually returns more than it costs. The reason is competitive tension — several qualified buyers interested at once will move the price in a way a single buyer never will. If you are near that line, a short consultation will tell you which side you are on.
What we are seeing in practice transactions, monthly
Market movement, valuation trends and what buyers are actually paying — written for principals, not for a mailing list. One email a month.
The process, the documents and the market insight — without engaging a broker
The complete toolkit gives you the recorded briefing, every template a broker would work from, and the transaction mapped end to end. Immediate access on purchase, yours to keep.
A 15-minute call with Michelle Knights, no obligation, to work out whether selling yourself or engaging a broker is the better route for your practice.
