Is it a mistake to start selling right after a bad year?

Not necessarily a mistake, but it does mean going in with realistic expectations, since buyers typically look at more than one year of financial history and a recent bad year will show up in that picture regardless of when you list. What matters more than the timing itself is whether you can explain the bad year clearly — a one-time cost, a lost contract you've since replaced, a market disruption — versus a decline that looks like it's continuing into the current year.

The trap is either hiding a bad year behind optimistic projections, which buyers' advisors are trained to probe, or assuming one weak year sinks the whole sale and giving up on the idea. Neither is accurate. A single explainable bad year against an otherwise solid multi-year track record is a very different conversation than the same bad year sitting on top of a longer slide.

If your current-year numbers are already recovering, it can be worth waiting until you have at least a partial rebound to point to before going to market, since that gives buyers a clearer story. If recovery will take longer than you're willing to wait, a business lawyer can help you think through how to present the history honestly rather than around it.