Are business brokers actually worth their massive commission?

12% is wild. I sold a landscaping biz last year and paid 6% to a local broker. He was okay, but honestly I did most of the buyer vetting myself. The one thing he did well was keep the deal from falling apart when the buyer got cold feet. That’s hard to price.

Most brokers are overpaid middlemen. They list on BizBuySell, take some calls, and then act like they invented fire. If you already have buyers, why give away 10%? Pay a good M&A lawyer and a CPA instead.

Depends on deal size. At $2M, 10% is $200k. A broker who gets you $2.5M instead of $1.8M just paid for himself three times over. The question is whether he can actually do that. Most can’t

I’m a broker (don’t shoot me) and and I’ll be the first to say there are a lot of terrible ones. But the good ones do more than just list. They normalize your financials, pre-empt buyer objections, and run a real process. If you’re talking to someone who says “I’ll handle everything” and quotes 12%, run. That’s a red flag.

Lol at “handle everything.” That means he’ll handle his commission check. You’ll still be doing the real work.

Have you considered a flat-fee broker or an M&A advisor who works on a smaller retainer plus success fee? 8–10% is common for small deals but it’s negotiable. I’d push for 6% with a minimum, and only if they bring a qualified buyer you haven’t already found.

Can we talk about the fact that most brokers don’t even have a fiduciary duty to you? They’re transaction brokers. They get paid when a deal closes, any deal. That alone should make you skeptical of paying them a fortune.

That’s not universally true. Some states require broker disclosure of agency and good brokers act like fiduciaries even if not legally bound. But yeah, the industry has a low bar for entry. Interview three, check references, and ask to see their last three closed deals.

Interview three? I’d rather interview zero and keep my $200k. Hire a lawyer who’s done 50 small business sales. They cost $10–20k and don’t take a percentage of your life’s work.

Appreciate the range of views. To be clear, I’m not against paying for value—I just want to know what that value actually looks like. Anyone got a concrete story where a broker materially changed the outcome? Like, they found a buyer you’d never have found, or they saved the deal?

In my case, the broker knew a regional competitor who was quietly looking to expand. I would never have guessed that company. That single intro got me an extra $150k over my original ask. So yeah, that one worked. But it was a 6% fee, not 12.

Great, so the broker’s value is “sometimes he knows a guy.” For $200k I can network a lot of guys myself.

It’s not just “knowing a guy.” It’s knowing how to present the financials so the buyer’s lender doesn’t balk, keeping the deal on track when the buyer’s attorney starts thrownig redlines, and managing the LOI-to-close slog. That said, 12% is excessive for a $2M deal. I’d say 7–9% is the typical range, and it should drop as the price goes up.

OP, you said you have two interested parties already. Sell to one of them and pay a lawyer $15k. Save the $185k difference. This isn’t complicated.

I don’t disagRee with the lawyer route, but there’s a middle path: hire a broker on a short exclusive with a reduced fee if they bring a buyer, and zero fee if you bring one. Some will do that. If they won’t, that tells you something.

One thing nobody’s mentioned: brokers often inflate your expectations to win the listing, then push you to accept a lower offr when the listing goes stale. Watch for that. It’s not malice, it’s incentives.