Key Takeaways
- Start Early: Maximising your final sale price requires initiating the exit conversation three to ten years before your planned departure from the business.
- Avoid Rushed Exits: Sales driven by unexpected health events, partnership breakdowns, or sudden lease expiries consistently result in local owners leaving significant money on the table.
- Dual Expertise: Author Con Tastzidis brings over four decades of experience to the local market as both a licensed commercial real estate agent and a registered business broker in NSW.
- Monthly Insights: This new ongoing column in The Post will deliver practical, jargon-free guidance on positioning your commercial property and enterprise assets for a premium market result.
There comes a point in every business owner’s life when the question shifts. It is no longer “how do I grow this?” It is “how do I get out — and how do I make sure I don’t leave money on the table when I do?”
That question is one I have spent more than four decades helping people answer.
My name is Con Tastzidis. I am the Managing Director of CST Properties, a Sydney-based commercial real estate and business brokerage firm. I hold a dual licence as both a licensed commercial real estate agent and a registered business broker in NSW – a combination that is less common than you might think, and one that shapes everything about how I work with clients. My clients range from private individuals and family businesses to local companies, international investors, and corporations.
I began my career in hotel operations, including on the opening team at InterContinental Sydney. From there, I moved into commercial property and business broking, working across retail, industrial, hospitality, childcare, lifestyle accommodation, and professional services over more than four decades.
The Cost of Not Planning
One pattern I have seen repeated more times than I care to count is this: a business or property owner forced to sell – not on their terms, but because circumstances have overtaken them. A health event. A partnership breakdown. A lease expiry that crept up unnoticed.
What follows is almost always the same. The sale is rushed, the preparation that would have added significant value has not happened, and the outcome is a fraction of what it could have been. It is genuinely sad to witness – good businesses sold cheaply, properties discounted because the lease was poorly structured or the financials were unclear. These are not rare exceptions. They are common occurrences, and in almost every case, they were preventable.
The fix is rarely complicated. It just requires time – which is precisely why starting the conversation three to ten years before you intend to exit makes such a profound difference to the result.
Experience, Technology, and Pattern Recognition
Four decades in this industry gives you something no platform can replicate: the ability to recognise patterns, anticipate problems, and read a situation before it becomes a crisis. I have embraced modern tools – market intelligence platforms, transaction databases, planning portals, digital marketing – because they make the advice I give more grounded and the outcomes more precise. But technology supports experience; it does not replace it.
Over the years, I have been fortunate to receive industry recognition for this work, but what matters more to me is the simpler measure: whether my clients walk away feeling they achieved the outcome they deserved.
What This Column Is About
Each month in The Post, I will be writing directly to business and property owners in this community about the things that matter most when transitioning from building to exiting: how to position for a premium result, what buyers actually look for, and what the owners who achieve the best outcomes do differently from those who don’t.
No jargon. No sugarcoating. Just an honest, experience-led perspective on the practical decisions that determine whether you exit well — or leave value behind that you should never have lost.
If something resonates with your own situation, I am always happy to have a conversation – whether you are three years from your exit or ten.
CST Properties and author of “The Transition Edge – Maximising your exit value without leaving money on the table” & Amazon top-selling book “Commercial real estate investing for the residential investor – the 7 myths of commercial real estate explained”