How to hand over your website on the sale of your business!
You find yourself as one of the lucky ones and in a position of selling your business. You have a buyer in place, you’ve negotiated a good deal and you’re ready to walk away from the business you founded all them years ago.
Like so many of the i’s to dot and t’s to cross during the process of selling a business, you will have amassed a fairly huge digital footprint for your business. Much of this will require handing over to the new owners.
Working with many companies during the handover process, we’ve seen it all.
What type of digital issues are frequently encountered?
- No one knows who is the registered owner of the domain name
- Where the website is hosted?
- Are there login details for the website’s CMS/CRM system?
- Who the monthly payment going out of the bank for website maintenance is going to? …and
- What are they actually doing as far as maintenance goes? (the new owner will want to know this)
The new owners may well be looking at revamping some things like a fresh new website etc, but to do that, they’ll need access.
This is when you find out that Pete from accounts is the actual owner of your business domain name and he’s not been with the company for 10 years. If your business is predominantly online based, theoretically, Pete from accounts owns a big asset of your business and as such can shut you down. (This actually happens more than you would think).
In a lot of case we have found the registrerd owner of domains for some fairly large organisations has been the person who originally built the first website. Most times that person is hard to find.
I’ve found out I don’t own my domain, what do I do?
How do you reclaim your own domain when you no longer have contact with the ‘registered’ owner?
If the domain in question is a UK domain i.e. ends in .UK, then you can contact Nominet who will help you resolve the ownership issues and transfer ownership to you. They usually charge a fee for this service and the amount depends on how quickly the domain issue is resolved and how helpful ‘Pete’ is. Hopefully a simple ownership transfer can be done, however, a disgruntled ex employee who holds the key can force you to take matters further and you will have to prove ownership your right to ownership. It can be a lengthy and costly experience.
Domains with international extensions like .com etc can be dealt with through the actual registrar i.e. 123Reg, Go-Daddy, 1&1 Ionos etc. Again, there will be a domain ownership transfer fee and this is different across the different registrars. You can usually find the registrar by performing a Whois Lookup on the domain name.
The Whois data will look like something similar to this. You will note the Registrar information I’ve highlighted for our domain.
Once you have total control of your business domain, the next stages are to make sure you have access to your website’s hosting. The first port of call here, if you don’t know what company hosts your website, is to check your bank statement to see who you pay for hosting. Or, you may also be able to contact your web designer as they will have no doubt had some dealing with your hosting providers or in a lot of instances, the web designer arranges the hosting.
Next, if your website has been built using a content management system such as WordPress, Wix etc, you should have access to the Admin panel to make changes to the content or add products etc. Your web design should be able to grant you access.
You should also check with your web team to make sure any licenses registered as part of the website build are owned by the company and you have access to these via a company email address.
You should now have a document with all the information required to hand over ownership of your company’s website. I would recommend saving this in a secure digital environment, not on a piece of paper or word document saved on your desktop. It is, after all, very valuable and should it fall into the wrong hands, could be devastating for any business, let alone one about to be taken over.
How would NIAGroup help you in this situation?
At Northern Investment Alliance Group Ltd, not only are we investors and owners of profitable businesses that we have purchased in the most transparent way on the market, the team behind it are some of the best in the field and have many years of experience. In this instance, our digital marketing expert would work his magic in making sure the process went smoothly. It’s just another reason why NIAGroup are the number one choice when selling a business.