Murphy Business Sales
At a Glance
Coverage almost everywhere, on terms you have to ask each office for one at a time.
- Pricing
- Custom Pricing, No fee of its own appears anywhere on the corporate site. Its blog states the industry's range rather than Murphy's: 'Brokerage fees tend to run between 5 and 10 percent of the selling price of a business.' A reader on a Murphy page can easily take that for a Murphy rate, which is why it is worth saying plainly that it is not.
- Best For
- Buyers who want the widest possible office coverage and are willing to work office by office
- Kind
- Independently run offices under one name, so the broker varies by market.
- Footprint
- Works nationwide.
- Seller Fee
- Publishes somebody else's range. The only percentages on its own site describe the industry or other firms rather than itself, on pages that ask what selling costs, so a number there is easy to read as a disclosure it never made.
- Roadmap Stages
- 2. Define & Test Your Thesis4. Source & Screen Deals
Pros and Cons
Pros
- The broadest published US office list of any firm on this shelf, at a level of detail a buyer can act on
- Publishes a founding year and a lifetime volume: 1994, and over $4.3 billion in completed transactions
- The franchise model is confirmable from its own franchise site, so the label is not inferred
Cons
- No fee of its own anywhere, and the only percentage on the site is an industry range that reads like one
- Its own pages disagree on how many states it covers, which is a disclosure-quality signal in itself
- Nothing published for buyers, and because each office is a separate business, ask the broker means asking a different company each time
What Searchers Say
Office list, founding year and volume read from its own pages. The homepage banner claims offices in 38 states while the locations page enumerates offices in roughly 52 US jurisdictions, so neither count is quoted here.
How to Approach
Murphy Business Sales is an office network rather than a single firm, and it works for the seller rather than for you, so this is how that side of the table comes in and what it is deciding about you.
The Typical Arc
- You reach one office rather than the brand, and that office runs its own process.
- A teaser and an NDA with the local broker who holds the listing.
- The CIM and the seller meeting, to that office's standard rather than a house one.
- Your offer, through that broker, whose duty runs to the seller.
What It Weighs
- The same three things any listing broker weighs: funds, criteria, and speed.
- Whether you are buying in that office's market, since the listings are local.
- Whether to refer you to a sister office, which is an introduction rather than a handoff.
How to Prepare
- Ask which office holds the listing and who your broker actually is.
- Write the one page a broker asks for before you inquire. Buyer Profile Builder
- Set criteria specific enough for a listing to match. Buy Box Builder