Selling your business is a lot like selling your house. There are certain things you can do that will quickly up the value of the business without spending too much time, money, or effort. For instance, by fixing up the yard and changing the front door on a house, you can completely change its appeal and subsequent value.

In business, people who buy and sell businesses for a living have secrets that allow them to buy a business at a low price, quickly increase its value, and sell it for a profit. Here are five of those secrets. For fun, I have used the advice from Rich Brooks’ Blog about pictures to include some visual appeal.

Straighten Up: Clean up the books.

If your books are a mess and your checkbook isn’t even balanced, you immediately and substantially decrease the value of you business. This is mainly due to the difficulty in determining the actual value of the business. Make sure you put everything through bookkeeping software and it is all up to date and as accurate as possible. It will take a long time if you have let it slide. Try to get the last three years of good, solid numbers. If you pay a CPA to conduct an audit of your books, you further increase the legitimacy of your numbers, and in so doing the value of your business.

No More Mr. Nice Guy: Improve cash flow.

Easier said than done, right? Wrong. Most business owners have some form of accounts receivable. If you can tighten your accounts receivable to 80% of invoices paid in 30 days and 99% in 60 days, you can make the cash flow look great. Other ways are to complete jobs more quickly than usual or use more aggressive selling tactics that result in quicker turn around time. These new numbers will look great in your cleaned up books!

Trim the Fat: Cut extra expenses.

Are you paying too much for your dumpster? Your cleaning service? Your bank account? All these things and more add up to more money going out. You want as much money as possible to stay in the business .

Tidy Up: Clean and service all assets.

Replace anything that is out of date or broken. You would be surprised how appealing a shiny new computer is! If everything you have looks worn down, the potential buyer may figure in replacement costs for everything when making an offer. The same is true for real estate. Make sure it looks nice so the new buyer can get excited about owning it.

No More Willy-Nilly: Write processes for EVERYTHING.

The more processes you have written down, the better. This way, the buyer knows he or she can be self sufficient once the purchase is complete. Having written processes gives the buyer confidence that the business will be able to go on as usual and nothing will be lost in the transition. Potential buyers will also appreciate your attention to detail. Also in your processes, include as much knowledge from every employee as possible. In short, put their working brains on paper, so that if anyone quits, they can be replaced.

These five simple ways are geared toward small businesses with few employees, but will work for larger businesses too. The bigger your business, the more ways you have to improve its value. By spending nine months to a year improving the value of your business, you may be much happier with the end result, and actually decrease the total time it takes to sell

Photo Credits: Tracy O and Stephen Foster, respectively.