BizBen: Legit For California Franchises And Businesses For Sale? (2025)

Introduction

Hey, Patrick Findaro here, co-founder at Vetted Biz. I've been getting a lot of commentary from the Vetted Biz community on different business-for-sale sites. Many people are thinking about buying an existing franchise and at Vetted Biz right now, we don't have that much information on existing businesses for sale. It's pretty limited just to the state of Florida.

In today's video, we're going to go through if BizBen is legit for California franchises and businesses for sale. We're going to go through everything you need to know about the BizBen website and see if it could be a good resource for you if you're looking to buy an existing franchise or buy a business for sale. BizBen's been around now for 26 years, and it's mostly focused on existing businesses for sale. About 10% of those listings are franchises.

Where are the franchises located?

Most of those franchises for sale are in the state of California as is the case with pretty much all 95% of the listings on BizBen being California based franchises, or more likely than not independent, non-franchise businesses.

BizBen's History

At Vetted Biz, we have franchise and business listings, but our business-for-sale listings are more Florida-focused. That makes BizBen a great complement if you’re looking to buy on the West Coast. BizBen was founded by Peter Siegel in 1994. And it appears now it's onto the second generation of the Siegel family, which is quite impressive as very few businesses last past 10 years. Nonetheless, being able to bring in the second generation, his son, into the business. And we're going to go through a few of the content items that BizBen provides prospective business buyers, as well as business sellers.

They offer a few resources for buyers and sellers. They host a weekly webinar and podcast featuring some of the top business brokers in California and other key advisors. For business brokers and franchise brokers, there are multiple advertising options, including custom banners and featured info footers starting at $250.

Don't worry, I'm not advertising. I don't get any compensation from BizBen for the recording of this video. We just have been getting a lot of inquiries from the community at Vetted Biz as well as our clients and prospective clients at our sister company, Visa Franchise. They do offer a ProBuy Program for buyers, which is a six-month program designed for buyers who want to work with BizBen throughout the entire buying process.

How BizBen works

They offer a ProBuy Program for buyers, which is a six-month plan. Buyers receive coaching, help with prequalified financing, and referrals to other professionals—attorneys, escrow services, sales services, and more.

You can also post a “buy listing” stating what you’re looking for. It helps line up the right team for your transaction. They’ve listed and worked on hundreds of thousands of businesses, so I imagine their experience compounds into solid support for buyers.

For sellers, there’s a ProSell Program. It seems like a good Kickstarter option for new brokers or intermediaries—especially if you're just getting started or still in the first few years of building your practice.

Differences between states

One big difference between California and Florida: in Florida, there are thousands of franchise resale opportunities at any time. Typically, there’s both buyer and seller representation, and commissions are split-kind of like in real estate. In a small business deal under $1 million, the total commission might be 10–12%, with around 6% for the real estate side, and the rest split between the buyer and seller brokers. So it shouldn't cost you more working with buyer representation in the state of Florida.

However, if you do decide to have buyer representation in California, and you're working with an actual business broker who wants a cut of the commission, it's going to generally limit the opportunities.

This is because in California, most of the time, the businesses are just represented by the seller, and it's just the seller. Seller represented broker who's receiving that commission.

Conclusion

In states like California, Arizona, and Texas, we get a lot of inquiries in Sun Belt states. You're going to have to talk to a lot of different business brokers and bizben.com is a good resource if you're looking to buy a business in the state of California. However, beyond California, there's really limited inventory in terms of businesses for sale.

And it's better to maybe consult some of the other websites out there like BizBuySell, and BizQuest. And we'll do some other reviews on some of the competitors at bizben.com like BizBuySell, Businesses For Sale, and bizquest.com. I hope you found this video informative. If you liked it, subscribe to us, and best of luck finding that franchise or business resale.