This is very painful to hear. I've tried selling my main company to 4 different buyers now... every single time we get past the LOI phase, they see all our financials in plain sight, and there's always some stupid hangup/ghosting/sketchiness exactly like in this article.
Very disappointing, considering how transparent we are up front sending every financial, and there's no real 'discoveries' later that would change their mind. It's just general terrible flakiness.
One guy's excuse was that his brother had put all his money into collateral without his knowledge, and that discovery phase was a waste of 5 months.
This last one, we thought we learned our lesson so we demanded proof of funds, as well as much more thorough checks....... and they just magically ghosted us LITERALLY after I FedExed the signed agreement... so after months and months of due diligience. They change their mind after about 100 confirmations from their lawyers, accountants, financers... and just ghost hours after I send it.
It has been greatly discouraging to me, as the 3 serious attempts to sell have essentially crushed our momentum, and now the company is dying/dead. I won't say that its a direct result of it, but we ran it very conservatively during these times as not to upset anything, and those were the times we needed to be running more aggressively to keep up with competition.
The company is essentially insolvent now, with a large amount of debt. I also made the bad mistake (I was quite young) to originally put the company card on an Amex applied for by me (I had 820 credit at the time). Because of inability to pay back debt on this company, my personal credit is now destroyed.
So.. going from 820 credit, making hundreds of thousands profit per month... to freelancing to pay bills with a 590 credit. Such is the life of an entrepreneur and the brutal lessons one learns along the way.
PS... I found out later our accountant had dementia, and did all our taxes wrong. My biggest advice, have an accountant who is really on point, and accept absolutely nothing less. Don't fall for the illusion of the pain of having to "retrain" someone if you don't think your accountant is 100%. Just find someone who is fucking good, and if they show a red flag, find someone you fully trust. My business partner has also been ruined in the past by incompetent accountants.