Ok. Thanks for your reply , can you explain further?
Well I'm in a good mood this morning, I've got precisely 13 minutes to kill until my first meeting, so I'll oblige. However if you search this forum you will find multiple similar threads and bits of advice.
The upshot is, the £26,000 isn't "profit" for the business. It's what it's cost in wages to get somebody (you) to do the work required. Let's say you are only doing 3 days a week, and doing 8 hours a day, which is actually highly unlikely (I am not calling you disingenuous - simply that the nature of the beast with sole trader operations like this is that there's often work involved without realising it - whether it's the "just doing an hour of paperwork" in the evening, or the "lets stay late and get this finished"etc). That equates to an hourly rate of just over £20/hr on average. Which sounds
ok.... but that's not covering or accounting for holidays, sick pay, out of hours work, etc etc. Given that there's realistically more than the 24 hours a week going into it, realistically it's probably not a huge amount above National Minimum Wage - which somebody could go and earn with job security and all the above benefits.
So, if someone comes along and buys "the business", let's say (pulling figures out of the air) they give you £50,000 for it, plus the cost of the cherry picker. They then have two options;
1. Pay somebody £15-£20 an hour to do the actual physical work (if you can even get an experienced/qualified person for that rate?). At that point, once they've paid their wages, there's no profit left in the business to pay themselves anything, so they'll never get a return on their £50k.
2. Do the work themselves, like you are doing. So at this point, they have just "bought a job". All they are doing is earning the £15-£20 an hour, which they could go and do at any other job without laying out £50k in advance for the privilige.
There is no real "business" to sell and certainly not involving business brokers, agents etc (despite what they might tell you if you plug their figures into their "online business valuation tool").
The quickest and easiest would be, as per your first post, to just sell the cherry picker. The other option, more in line with Marks suggestion, would be to "sell" the business but through the likes of something like Facebook marketplace or through word of mouth with a bit of a nod and a wink and nothing more official than the vehicle transferring. You may well find someone that dreams of the self employed life and has some redundancy money or a divorce separation payout burning a hole in their pocket, and you might squeeze an extra few grand out of them - if the cherry picker truly is worth £35k, you might get someone to give you £40k all in for example.
Hope this helps.
