Here's the piece with m-dashes removed:
This one still stings, and it happened four days ago.
We listed a restaurant. Five days on the market, not five weeks, five days, and we had a showing. A qualified buyer, brought in by another broker, walked through the door ready to talk. This is exactly what you list a restaurant for. This is the moment every seller waits for.
They submitted an offer at about 15% under asking price.
What happened next is why I'm writing this.
The seller lost his mind.
Not figuratively. He rejected the offer flat out, wouldn't discuss it, wouldn't even sit with it for an hour. I told him, more than once, clearly, that at an absolute minimum we needed to counter. You don't have to love the number. You don't have to meet them halfway. But you respond. That's how this works. That's how deals get done.
He wasn't hearing it. His position was simple: counter at nothing. Full price or walk.
So they walked.
Here's where it gets painful to tell.
Twenty-four hours later, he's calling me. Frantic. Turns out he went home and his wife sat him down and explained, in whatever terms a spouse uses when their partner has just done something genuinely foolish, that this was not a smart move. She was right. He knew she was right. And now he wanted to go back with a counter.
I went back. Of course I did, that's my job, and I wasn't ready to give up on this deal.
The broker on the other side said he'd check with his clients and get back to me.
I followed up. Then again. Then again. Five, six, seven attempts, calls, messages, every professional avenue I had. Nothing. No response. The buyer was gone, the broker had moved on, and the deal was stone cold dead.
One day. That's all it took. One day of digging in out of pride, and a qualified buyer who showed up five days into a fresh listing, five days, was gone for good.
I've been doing this long enough that this story shouldn't surprise me anymore. It still does.
There's a version of this that plays out in some sellers' heads where holding firm means winning. Where refusing to budge signals strength. Where a full-price offer is just around the corner if they're patient enough. I understand why sellers think that way. They built something. They put years into that business and they know what it cost them, the early mornings, the staff problems, the margin pressure, all of it. When someone comes in low, it can feel personal.
It isn't. It's business.
And here's the number that should reframe this for every seller reading right now: according to BizBuySell's Insight Report, restaurants sold at an average of 88% of asking price across 1,774 closed transactions. Not 100. Not 95. Eighty-eight cents on the dollar. That's not an outlier or a down year or a bad market. That's just how restaurant sales work. Listings are priced with room to negotiate because that's how transactions work. If you go to market expecting the right buyer will simply appear with a full-price offer and zero pushback, you're not being disciplined. You're setting everyone up, yourself included, to fail.
A 15% gap at the opening of a negotiation is not a disaster. It's a conversation starter. And conversations can close.
What you cannot do is negotiate with a door you've already slammed.
Once that buyer left, the leverage shifted completely. Now he's the one chasing. Now the buyer, if he's even still interested, knows there was hesitation, knows the seller blinked, knows he has the upper hand. Even if we'd gotten a call back, we'd have been negotiating from a worse position than we were in 48 hours earlier.
We didn't get a call back.
So let me be direct, because there's no polite way to say this: if you are a restaurant seller and your strategy is full price or nothing, please do not list your restaurant. Not yet. Because what you're really doing is wasting your broker's time, burning out buyers who could have been the right ones, and running up your own carrying costs. Rent, payroll, food, utilities, all of it keeps running while your listing sits there collecting dust.
The 10% you're protecting by refusing to negotiate? It evaporates fast when you're six months further in and the listing has gone cold and buyers are asking why it's been on the market so long.
Stale listings get lowballed harder, not less.
Here's what sellers never stop to calculate: the actual dollar cost of a deal that falls apart. Let's say your restaurant carries $8,000 a month in rent, payroll obligations you can't just pause, food and supply costs, insurance, and utilities. That's not unusual, that's a pretty modest operation. If your listing goes cold for three months because you chased off the buyer who showed up in week one, you've just burned $24,000 in carrying costs protecting a negotiating position that was never going to hold anyway.
And that's before the price reduction.
Because here's what happens to listings that sit: buyers notice. Brokers notice. When something has been on the market for 90, 120, 180 days, the first question every buyer asks is what's wrong with it. You can have a perfectly good restaurant with real cash flow and a clean lease, and the timestamp on your listing will do more damage than any offer you ever rejected. The longer it sits, the more you'll end up discounting, not because the business got worse, but because the market's perception of it did.
So the seller who turns down an 88-cent offer on day five and relists at a lower price six months later didn't protect anything. He just paid $24,000 for the privilege of taking less money anyway.
Counter the offer. Every time.
You can counter high. You can counter with terms that favor you. You can counter in a way that signals you're serious and you know what your business is worth. But you counter. You stay in the conversation. You don't let your ego write a check your P&L can't cash.
The deal is never dead until someone walks away. Don't be the one who makes them walk.
Questions I Hear From Sellers
If I counter, doesn't that tell the buyer I'll come down?
The buyer already assumes you'll come down, that's why they came in under asking. Your counter doesn't reveal weakness. It reveals that you're a professional who's ready to transact. Silence, or a flat rejection, reveals something else.
What if the offer is genuinely too low to take seriously?
Counter anyway. Even a counter near your listing price keeps the door open. You'd be surprised how many deals that start 25% apart end up closing. The only way to find out is to stay in the room.
How much room should I expect to give?
Use 88% of listing price as your mental benchmark, that's the actual average for restaurant sales according to BizBuySell's data across nearly 1,800 closed deals. Plan around that number. If you need full price to make the deal work financially, that's a conversation to have with your broker before you list, not in the middle of a live offer.
I didn't counter and the buyer left. Is there any coming back from that?
Sometimes. Have your broker reach back out through the other side, deals do occasionally resurrect. But don't count on it, and don't wait around hoping. Get your head right for the next offer, and when it comes in, handle it differently.
How long will a buyer wait for a counter?
Not long. Qualified buyers with good representation are almost always looking at more than one option. A day of silence can be enough. We watched it happen this week in real time.
What if I'm just not emotionally ready to negotiate?
Then you're not ready to sell. That's not a criticism, it's just the truth. Selling a business you've built is hard and it comes with real grief alongside the relief. But the market doesn't pause for that. If you're not in the right headspace to sit across from a low offer and respond rationally, wait until you are. List when you're ready to sell, not just ready to try.
My broker says I should counter. Should I listen?
Yes.