Transnational matchmaking tool for business succession

Transferring a business is a highly complicated and difficult issue. The consortium of the Interreg
Central Europe project “ENTER-transfer” has dealt, researched and dissected all connected issues
relating with business successions since 2016. First in-depth studies of the current state-of-the-art
were conducted and stakeholders of the public sector and more importantly business owners who
already went or will go through a business succession process were involved in the research phase.

One of the main issues of business succession, is the challenge of finding a suitable successor. There
are several potential paths on how to choose and pick a successor – but especially with external
successors there is the issue of not knowing of each other. From the perspective of a successor,
taking over a business is a viable and generally safer approach than founding a Start-up, because the
existing business already offers a network of clients and business partners.
Therefore, we decided to create an online market place, where business owners can find and meet
potential successors. One of the big differences and innovative aspect to other platforms, is the
transnational approach, where you may find businesses across borders. So far, we’re actively
promoting the platform in Austria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovakia and Poland.

As a user you have the chance to promote yourself or your company and find the perfect match by
searching the profiles with the help of filters, which categorize the profiles by size, location and
business sector. Furthermore, you’ll be able to find links to relevant regional platforms/homepages,
which will help you on your journey to a successful business transfer.

We expect the development to be ready by the end of March 2020 and platform to be ready for use by public in April 2020. In addition to that a Launch event of the Matchmaking platform is planned to take place in May, to further promote and disseminate the knowledge about the tool and increase the number of registered users/companies.