Baton Changelog: Smarter small business insights, searches & listings

Hello world! I’m Alex, Baton’s Head of Engineering. We are back with another changelog! In this edition, we’re showcasing all the work accomplished over the last three months with the theme of feedback, feedback, feedback! Thanks to everyone who’s given us direct feedback — both encouraging and constructive. Without it, we wouldn't be able to build and improve the nation’s best Small Business Marketplace!

Here’s what’s changed for our Buyers and Owners.

For Everyone

Listing and Valuation Report Histograms

Home sellers and buyers have had similar sold homes comparisons for years. We wanted to give you the same quick insights, and even deeper ones.

Owners, we know that seeing how your business’s financials compare to similar sold businesses can help give you a sense of where you stand on the market. In addition to the Sales Comparables for you and for buyers — something we’ve had for a while — we now offer you Listing Histograms. 

More than comps of just a few other relevant businesses, histograms can give you a bigger-picture view of where your business listing stands. They’re there to help you visualize and quickly compare the key data points of your business’s cash flow multiple and asking price to your industry’s cash flow multiple and sales price — both the average and a range (+/- one standard deviation). 

Buyers, are you getting a good deal? Listing histograms help you visualize and quickly hold your favorite businesses’ cash flow multiples and asking prices up to industry benchmarks.

Why cash flow multiple? Since cash flow multiple addresses your business's relative value, growth potential, and profitability, we chose this as our metric for market comparison.

Where the data comes from: Our extensive sales comp database

For Buyers

Search Filters and Saved Search Alerts

We received a lot of feedback after launching Explore. Many of you were looking for a more straightforward small business-for-sale search experience on Baton. With that, we are proud to introduce Search! Our new search experience uses filters instead of natural language. We made this switch to reduce ambiguity and ensure you find that hidden gem sooner. You can now whittle down your search  with the following criteria:

• Business name

• Industry

• Location (state for now)

• Asking Price

• Adjusted Cash flow

• Gross revenue

• Cash Flow Multiple

Over the next few months, we will add even more filters, so please stay tuned.

Let us search for you

Alongside our new search experience, we have launched Saved Search Alerts. Once you configure a search to your criteria, you can name it and save it to our database. When a listing goes live on Baton’s platform, you will receive a Saved Search Alert email letting you know there’s a new listing ready for your review. Our amazing M&A Advisors take pride in getting you from initial diligence to closing within 30-60 days. We hope this new feature will supercharge the front end of your search and get you to that closing in record time.

We've also made business financials much easier for you to scan, capturing more data points and adjustments, broken out line-by-line.

For Owners

Teasers for privacy protection

For all our owners, we understand that discretion is vital for a smooth transaction. Your information is safe with us. As a result, we have launched Teaser Search and Teaser Listings.

Teaser Search is like Search with one key difference: We hide all identifying information about your business until a user has registered and logged in to Baton. By doing so, we can host your listing publicly — increasing the number of prospective buyers who see it — while also protecting your privacy. When a buyer comes to the Baton platform, they can search on the same criteria as Search, but they don't see your location, your business's name, or your name. When they view your teaser listing, they will not see any identifying information about you or your business. They will see a short description of your business, key financials, and why we are interested in listing this business.

Go-to-market dashboard for a smooth business listing launch

We know it takes a lot of work to get your business to market. Keeping communications as well as financial and ownership documents straight can feel like a job in itself. We’re helping you get your head out of email by giving you the Go-to-market Dashboard to see what you’ve done and what we still need to get your business listing live.

Bug fixes and improvements:

• No bugs to report since last! 

• You’ll now see a handy Share icon and link in the top-right corner of every business listing. Click or tap it to copy a shareable link you can paste into an email or message to share with a business buyer who might be interested. 

• Read the latest Baton customer reviews right from our Homepage, courtesy of TrustPilot. 

Thanks again for helping us continually improve a new breed of small business marketplace. Have a suggestion? Drop us a line. And watch this space for more improvements. We’re only getting started!