The Median Restaurant Took 226 Days to Sell. The Median Laundromat Took 412.

Owners plan an exit around a number. The data says the variable that actually moves is the calendar — and it starts running after the preparation most owners never did.

The number owners carry around is a price. The number that varies is time.

Ask an owner what they expect from a sale and you will get a dollar figure, usually a confident one. Ask how long it will take and you get a shrug and a guess — six months, maybe. The market data says the price is the more predictable of the two. Median sale prices across sectors cluster in a fairly tight band. Time on market does not cluster at all.

In BizBuySell’s full-year 2025 transaction data, the median route business sold in 151 days. The median laundromat took 412. Same marketplace, same year, same buyer pool — and a gap of more than eight months between them, explained by nothing except what the business does. If you are budgeting your exit on a generic six-month assumption, you are off by a quarter in one direction or two quarters in the other, and you will not know which until you are already listed.

Notice which businesses sit at the slow end. They are not the weak ones. Gas stations and laundromats are cash-flowing, often quite profitable, and famously durable. What they have in common is complexity a buyer has to underwrite: environmental exposure, equipment replacement schedules, leases, licences. The businesses at the fast end are the ones a buyer can understand in an afternoon. Time on market is mostly a measure of how long it takes somebody else to get comfortable.

Time on market is not a measure of how good your business is. It is a measure of how long a stranger needs to believe you.

The market got slower and pickier at the same time

The Q2 2026 report describes a market that did not weaken so much as narrow. 2,117 businesses changed hands, down 10% both from the prior quarter and from a year earlier. But the median sale price barely moved — $349,250, down 1% — and the average cash flow multiple actually rose 2% to 2.7. Fewer deals, at held-up prices, is the signature of buyers being selective rather than absent.

The sector splits tell you where the patience went. Service businesses — 40% of all transactions — got faster, improving 9% to 155 days, even as their volume fell 11%. Manufacturing went the other way: deals took 247 days to close, up 17% year over year, with the average cash flow multiple dropping 7% despite median cash flow rising 17%. Buyers were paying less for stronger manufacturing earnings and taking two extra months to decide. That is not a pricing problem. That is a diligence problem.

The gap that quietly adds months: financing nobody agreed to

Here is the disconnect most owners do not see coming. 90% of buyers expect seller financing to be part of the acquisition. 29% of owners plan to offer it. Almost half of sellers say they will not provide it at all, and another 23% have not decided.

That gap is not an abstraction — it is weeks. With 78% of buyers expecting to use SBA financing, and SBA rules tightening through 2026, a deal that needs a seller note to close is a deal that stalls while two parties who never discussed it negotiate one from scratch, mid-diligence, with the buyer’s lender waiting. Deciding your position on seller financing before you list costs you an afternoon. Deciding it during diligence costs you a quarter.

The clock you actually control starts earlier

Every number above measures days on the market. None of them measure the part before that, and the same report shows how little of that part is done. 52% of owners say they have an exit plan. 50% have a rough estimate of what the business is worth. 35% say they have no idea at all. And 14% — one in seven — have had a professional valuation.

Put those two facts side by side. Buyers are underwriting harder than they were two years ago — scrutinising cash flow durability, owner dependence, clean financials — and the majority of sellers are arriving with a number they made up. The 226 days the median restaurant spent on the market is the market’s response time to a business that was ready. The businesses that were not ready are not in that median. They are still listed.

I have never met an owner who regretted starting too early. I have met plenty who discovered, eleven months in, that the thing holding up their deal was a lease clause, or a customer concentration they could have fixed in a year, or the fact that the business could not run for two weeks without them. None of that is fixable once you are listed. All of it is fixable now, while the clock that matters has not started.

So do the unglamorous version first. Get a real valuation, not an estimate — you are in the 86% who have not. Decide, in writing, whether you will carry paper. Find the one thing a buyer will flinch at and spend this year removing it. You cannot make the market faster. You can make sure that when it finally looks at you, it does not need 412 days to make up its mind.

Published by The Lonely Entrepreneur — the community and coaching platform for entrepreneurs who are building alone. lonelyentrepreneur.com

This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for professional financial or legal advice.