Buying a Small Business
Buying a Small Business in France
Know what you are buying before you pay for it
The short version
In France the business itself is a fonds de commerce: acheter or reprendre un fonds means taking the lease, the licence and the staff with it. This page is about what to check before you pay.
Across 2023–2025, 91,907 sales of French businesses were published with a price and a known trade, in a record anyone can look up. This book counts them from the official bulletin of legal notices, not from a broker’s estimate — and then shows you how to check the one in front of you.
You are about to buy a café, a bakery, a garage, a salon. The seller shows you figures. The notary hands you a deed. Nobody tells you that in France the price you pay can be claimed a second time by the seller’s creditors, that his unpaid tax can be asked of you up to the whole price, or that his staff arrive with everything he still owes them.
This book is about those three things and eleven more, in the order a purchase happens: choose your trade and your price, find the business, check it, negotiate, sign, and survive the first months.
What’s inside
- 1What you are actually buying
- 2What a business costs: twenty trades and the regions
- 3The seller's figures: revenue and hidden defects
- 4The premises: does the lease come with the business?
- 5The seller's debts: publish, wait, and let someone else hold the price
- 6A pledge on the business: the debt that follows the sale
- 7The seller's taxes: why your money waits
- 8The staff come with the business, and so does what they are owed
- 9Telling the staff before the sale: the month you wait
- 10Permits: the ones for the business and the ones for you
- 11Will the seller open up next door?
- 12The preliminary contract and the deed
- 13What the deal itself costs: the duty, and how long the money waits
- 14The first months after you buy, and when something surfaces
- Appendices
- AHow the numbers were counted
- BMedian price by trade and region
- CThe whole checklist
- DWhere to check
- EFrench words in this book
From the book
Sales of French businesses in 2023–2025 with a published price and a known trade.
What the middle bakery sold for.
What the middle bar sold for — and €310,000 in the Paris region.
Appendix A explains how the numbers were counted. Appendix B gives the median price by trade and region.
Editions
- EnglishBuying a Small Business in France
Know what you are buying before you pay for it - FrançaisReprendre un commerce en France
Sachez ce que vous achetez avant de le payer
On Amazon
Every edition of this book is available now as a Kindle edition.
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EnglishBuying a Small Business in France
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FrançaisReprendre un commerce en France
Chapter 1, “What you are actually buying”, is free to read before you decide.
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When something changes that touches this book — a court decision, a law, a figure — it goes into the letter for the countries you follow, at most once a month. Each item comes with its source and date.
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