Although Mr Rowe had planned for 15 years, there were many strict rules governing all aspects of his business when it came to selling.

“I had to consider image and branding, merchandising, category management, promotions,

staff training, customer tagging and the customer loyalty card,” Mr Rowe said.

“Another problem I had was that the original succession plan was to find another pharmacist to become a partner in the business and eventually sell out to them.

It took eight years to find a suitable person and I had started the process of gradually selling the business to one of my employees who had been with me for some time.

He started by buying a small share with the intention of eventually buying the whole business but this fell through.

Statistics show that almost one million small business owners will be exiting in the next 10 years and half expect their business to fund most of their retirement but with most planning to sell, it is expected there will be a huge over supply and with fewer buyers, many businesses won’t sell.

“We are pretty happy with how things went. My only regret is that two of my long term employees lost their jobs despite all the assurances before the sale,” Mr Rowe said.

When Paul Buckley’s business failed to sell the first time because the buyers could not get finance, he did not panic because he had been planning for 17 years to sell his business.

Mr Buckley was determined not to be one of the 80 percent of business people that failed to sell their business, putting all his hard work at risk and his retirement funds in jeopardy.

Running a financial planning business, Mr Buckley knew it was essential to put together strategies to encourage maximum return including changing the name of the business to a generic name, ensuring staff could run the systems and processes and empowering staff to plan and carry out the operations without him.