Category: Legal Guide

What does buying a business in Canada actually involve, start to finish?
 
The short version: finding the target, agreeing on a letter of intent, doing the due diligence, negotiating the purchase agreement, and closing. The long version is where deals are won and lost, because each stage has decisions that can’t be unwound later.
 
Asset deal or share deal. What conditions to attach. What the diligence needs to catch. What survives closing and for how long.
 
This guide walks the whole process in order, in plain language, so you know what’s coming before you’re in the middle of it.

How long does due diligence actually take when you buy a business?

Longer than most buyers plan for, and that mismatch causes real problems: financing deadlines that expire mid-investigation, sellers who get impatient, and buyers who cut corners to hit a date they picked before they knew what they were checking.

The process runs in stages: assembling the document requests, reviewing the financials and contracts, chasing the gaps, and negotiating what you find into the purchase agreement.

This guide lays out the process step by step, what happens in each stage, and the realistic timeline for a private business deal in Ontario.

Everyone tells you to do due diligence before buying a business. But what does that actually mean?

Due diligence is the organized investigation of everything you’re about to pay for: the financials, the contracts, the employees, the tax history, the litigation nobody mentioned, and the liabilities that transfer with the deal.

It’s the stage where good deals get confirmed and bad deals get caught. Skip it or rush it, and the problems you didn’t find become yours at closing, at full price.

This piece explains what due diligence covers, who does what, and why the boring checklist work is what saves buyers from the expensive surprises.

You’ve found the business you want to buy. Now what?

The letter of intent is where a real deal starts. It sets the price, the structure, and the ground rules for everything that follows, and the terms you concede here have a way of becoming permanent, even though most of the document is technically non-binding.

After helping buyers through this stage on deal after deal, I can tell you the LOI is where good deals are won and bad deals become inevitable.

This step-by-step guide walks through how to write a letter of intent for a business purchase: what goes in, what stays out, which clauses actually bind you, and the mistakes that hand the seller leverage you’ll never get back.