Small business liquidations are everywhere, it seems. With record numbers of bankruptcies, even business which were considered successful are failing at alarming rates. Liquidation is often the most visible sign of their passing.

Business liquidators are operating in every major city. In Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, Phoenix, Baltimore and New York small business owners are conducting their own liquidation sales, and contacting professional liquidators to haul away their excess inventory, office furniture, computers and fixtures.

If you are a small business owner faced with liquidation, you can expect to receive only a portion of the amount of money you paid for the inventory or equipment, but the upside is that within a specific time frame your responsibilities for that portion of your business will be over.

Sometimes liquidation can keep a business owner from bankruptcy, but often there is not enough money generated to pay off creditors. In either case, the business owner may come to view the final day of liquidation as the beginning of a new phase of his life.

When the business is finally wound down and closed, the sense of relief may soon be replaced with a feeling of anxiety. The certainty of the old business has been replaced with a clean, if not clear, view of the future. What are the owner’s options? Starting another business? Getting a job?

True entrepreneurs will start looking for the next venture, and will compare the potential of each new opportunity with the successes and failures of his past. If liquidation served to point out the downside of business overhead and inventory costs, perhaps a new business model will be examined. Many former owners of brick-and-mortar business have turned to the internet to find an alternative business model to the one which ended in liquidation.

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Filed under: Business

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