Pimp my business

Just had another spam ‘phone call to ask whether I’m considering selling the business.

This is clearly not someone who knows anything about the business, let alone wants to buy.  They’re just working through a list of registered businesses.  It has all the tell-tale signs of a junk call: a bored voice with a strong Indian accent reading from a script, the noise of the call centre making it very hard to distinguish a word of what he’s trying to say.  Oh, and an 08** number, which I wouldn’t answer at all if it came through on the landline[1], but do take on the mobile as they’re still relatively rare there and because it’s a number used for legitimate incoming work calls.

When I started writing this, I was going to ask what the **** they hoped to sell me if I’d said yes, I was considering selling the business.  But I guess that’s not so hard: if my business had fitted into some regular category they deal with, they’d have introduced me to some relevant broker and taken a commission.  Or perhaps they’d have done that anyway, and left the broker to flounder on assets they can’t make anything of.

Or maybe the right broker could: “SEO” is nowadays an asset with monetary value, and the googlerank of my webpages might still be worth quite a lot to someone prepared to abuse it.  Maybe they could even make something of my existing software/online services and turn that into revenue (yeah, right, dream on – that’s where I originally saw WebThing going before it became clear that my consultancy time was the only thing people wanted to pay for).  Though whatever value any of those things might have is certainly faded over the years they’ve been collecting dust: Site Valet would at least want updating before I could seriously recommend it for the ‘net of 2010, and older stuff is pretty-much completely lost/obsoleted.

Anyway, that’s hardly relevant to an annoying spam call.  Suppose I had been wanting to sell my business, and had more conventional assets: for example a high street presence and a loyal customer base, or a laboratory or factory.  How might I go about realising the value of my assets?  Surely not by struggling to understand a word of what someone from a noisy call centre is trying to say?

[1] As they do most days, sometimes several in a day, despite my having supposedly opted out.