Business | Knowledge
WHY MOST PRINTING BUSINESSES ARE NOT SELLABLE – AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
STUART MASON, FOUNDER OF HERE’S HOW TO, HIGHLIGHTS HOW MOST BUSINESSES ARE NOT BUILT TO BE SOLD, BUT THAT THERE IS A WAY TO APPEAL TO BUYERS.
Here’s a statistic that should make every print business owner sit up straight: Around 80% of businesses listed for sale never sell. They sit on the market, gathering dust, while the owner becomes increasingly frustrated, confused and, in many cases, offended that no one is prepared to pay what they believe it’s ‘worth’. If you run a printing or graphics business, this
matters, because most small print firms are not built to sell, they’re built to survive. They’re built to get the presses running on Monday
morning, to make payroll on Friday, to keep long- standing customers sweet, and to squeeze another couple of percentage points out of a tight-margin job. Then, twenty years later, the owner says, “I might sell in a couple of years.” That’s usually where the problems begin. A business built around you is not a sellable asset; it’s a job with a logo. When I wrote Go To $ell, the core principle was simple: You don’t prepare a business for sale at the end. You build it in a way that makes it sellable from day one. In the print trade, that requires a level of honesty most owners would rather avoid.
20 | April/May 2026
LET’S TALK ABOUT WHERE IT GOES WRONG In many printing businesses turning over between £500k and £2m, the owner is the glue. They price the jobs, approve the proofs, negotiate paper deals, calm down awkward customers, and know the quirks of every key account. It feels valuable, it feels essential, but to a buyer, it feels dangerous. If you walked out tomorrow, what actually remains? If your biggest clients say, “I only deal with you,” that isn’t loyalty. It’s dependency, and dependency kills value. A buyer wants to see that pricing is structured, documented and transferable, that account relationships are shared, and that someone else can make decisions. If you can’t step away for two weeks without the place wobbling, you don’t have a business that’s ready to sell. You have a business that’s reliant on you being permanently available. Closely linked to that is customer concentration.
Many print businesses grow around one or two strong commercial accounts, perhaps a retail group, a leisure operator, or a local authority. On the surface, it feels secure. In reality, if one
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