What you buy: assets or shares
Buying a salon that already trades is the other route in. You do not start with an empty unit but with a diary that is full, a team already in place and a lease that runs. That saves months, and it shifts the risk: starting from scratch, you do not know whether clients will come; buying, you do not know whether they will stay.
Start with the form. For a hair salon it is almost always an asset deal, simply because most are a sole trader or a partnership and no shares exist. You buy fit-out, stock, goodwill and the contracts you take on. The debts, the tax liabilities and the seller's history stay behind. With a bv, the shares carry everything that happened in the past, and the due diligence gets heavier.
One thing to settle before you go further: KVK writes in its takeover step plan that you carry a duty to investigate and that the seller is obliged to share correct information, checked September 2026. Those two duties sit side by side. If you do not ask, it is hard to rely later on what you did not know. Where the money comes from is covered separately in the article on financing a Dutch salon.
Personal goodwill is the whole story
This is the question that comes back on Dutch business forums in one shape or another: how much goodwill is reasonable when the revenue is attached to the departing owner. KVK draws a distinction you can use in any negotiation. Business goodwill flows from the name or the performance of the business, which the buyer keeps benefiting from, so it belongs in the price. Personal goodwill is attached to the owner and is lost on a transfer, checked September 2026.
In a hair salon that distinction is sharper than in almost any other trade. Clients book a person, not a building. The question is not whether there is personal goodwill in the price, but how much.
Three questions that make the difference visible. What share of revenue sits under the departing owner's own name. How many clients have sat with more than one staff member in the past twelve months. And is there staff staying who hold clients of their own, or is the owner the only one leaving.
Ask as well what the departing owner is allowed to do afterwards. A non-compete of one to two years within a radius that matches the catchment area is normal and belongs in the purchase agreement. Without it, you are buying a client list from someone free to reopen two streets away.
Working out an asking price in four steps
Asking prices on listing platforms are not valuations. They are the seller's opening bid. Convert them into something you can explain.
Take a concrete case: a salon with the owner and two staff, annual revenue 180,000 EUR excluding VAT, asking price 65,000 EUR. As a benchmark, the Dutch government report MKB-indicatorbedrijf De kapsalon by Sira Consulting puts average annual revenue for salons with staff at roughly 177,000 EUR. So this business sits just above the average for its own category.
The same report puts salons without staff at about 22,000 EUR, and that figure needs explaining because elsewhere it reads differently. It is an arithmetic mean across every registration without staff, so it includes part-timers, businesses run alongside a job, and registrations that barely trade. It is not a benchmark for a full-time freelance practice. The average across all one-person businesses sits at roughly 33,000 EUR per business according to the Monitor Kerndata 2025 (865 million across 26,010 businesses), and per FTE at 33,257 EUR, but most freelance hairdressers work part time. Anyone running full time therefore sits well above that average. The figures and the arithmetic are in the key figures for the Dutch hairdressing industry. So compare the salon you are buying with its own category and its own occupancy, not with a sector average drawn from a different sample.
| Step | Item | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Asking price | 65,000 EUR |
| 1 | Less: fit-out and stock, valued | 18,000 EUR |
| 1 | Leaves as goodwill | 47,000 EUR |
| 2 | Profit before tax per the accounts | 52,000 EUR |
| 2 | Add back: depreciation on fit-out | 6,000 EUR |
| 3 | Less: market salary for the owner's own hours, 32 hours a week at 24 EUR all-in over 46 weeks | 35,300 EUR |
| 3 | Normalised profit before interest, tax and depreciation | 22,700 EUR |
| 4 | Goodwill divided by that profit | 2.07 |
Step by step: 65,000 minus 18,000 leaves 47,000 EUR of goodwill. 52,000 plus 6,000 is 58,000 EUR. 32 hours times 24 EUR times 46 weeks is 35,328 EUR, rounded to 35,300, and 58,000 minus 35,300 is 22,700 EUR. Finally 47,000 divided by 22,700 is 2.07.
Step 3 is the one almost everyone skips and the one that decides everything. In a sole trader the owner's own work is not a cost, so the profit in the accounts includes their own pay. Leave it in and you are buying back your own labour.
Is 2.07 reasonable? There is no sector figure for hair salons, so compare against what does exist. Brookz measured an average of 5.0 times EBITDA in the Dutch SME market in its H2 2025 barometer, with retail as the lowest sector at 2.5.
Two things push that figure down further before you apply it to a salon. Brookz itself notes that smaller SMEs attract a lower multiple because they depend on their management or on a few large clients, and that this correction can run to some 20 percent of the original multiple. And the barometer measures businesses with 0.5 to 50 million EUR of revenue, so a salon on 180,000 EUR falls outside that sample and sits below the bottom bracket. Retail at 2.5 minus that 20 percent lands on 2.0. Against that background 2.07 is defensible. Second check: 47,000 EUR of goodwill is 26 percent of annual revenue.
Then the scenario that overturns the sum. Suppose a third of revenue is attached to the departing owner, so 60,000 EUR, and half of that walks in the first year. That removes 30,000 EUR of revenue. The same government report shows 94 percent of sector revenue comes from services and 6 percent from product sales, so a lost treatment carries almost no saved purchasing behind it. Nothing is left of that 22,700 EUR of normalised profit. Which is why retention per staff member is not a nice-to-have in due diligence, but the number the price stands or falls on.
What to request before you make an offer
KVK advises doing due diligence after a signed letter of intent and bringing in an accountant or tax adviser. This is the list that matters specifically for a salon.
| Document | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Annual accounts for 3 years | The trend in revenue and margin, and one-off items inflating the most recent year |
| VAT returns for 3 years | Whether they reconcile with the accounts. Cutting and shaving fall under 9 percent, while beauty treatments, make-up, manicure, pedicure and retail products are at 21 percent |
| Export from the booking system | Revenue and client numbers per staff member, and how many clients returned more than once in 12 months |
| Personnel files | Contract type, contracted hours, years of service, pay scale, holiday entitlement and accrued leave |
| Lease plus any addenda | Type of business premises, remaining term, indexation, and whether transfer is permitted |
| Supplier and lease contracts | Minimum purchase commitments, term, and whether they are transferable |
| Open complaints and guarantees | Pending disputes committee cases and corrective treatments already promised |
Two things you can check on your own feet before believing any figure. Walk past on three different parts of the day and count occupied chairs. And compare revenue per chair with the 50,000 to 75,000 EUR a year range in the article on Dutch hairdressing industry figures. Well below that, and you are buying a problem the seller is charging goodwill for.
The staff transfer by operation of law
This is where buyers are caught out most often. On a transfer of undertaking, the rights and obligations under the employment contracts pass to the acquirer by operation of law, under article 7:663 of the Dutch Civil Code. Preservation of terms comes with it, and this is mandatory law: you cannot contract it away and you cannot agree around it with the seller.
Three consequences to price in. Years of service continue, so a staff member with eight years brings those eight years along, including the accrual behind any future statutory severance. Article 7:670(8) forbids dismissal because of the transfer itself, although dismissal for economic, technical or organisational reasons remains possible. And after the transfer the seller stays jointly liable alongside you for one year for obligations that arose before that moment, under article 7:663.
So work the wage costs through before you bid, and put accrued holiday and holiday allowance in the purchase agreement as a line item. What being an employer involves is covered in the article on hiring your first salon employee.
The lease is the second place deals collapse
A salon without premises is a client list with chairs. The seller cannot simply hand you the lease: the landlord has to agree.
If the landlord will not, there is a way through. Article 7:307 of the Dutch Civil Code lets a court order a substitution of tenant. The sitting tenant must have a weighty interest in transferring the business, and the court must reject the request if the proposed tenant offers insufficient guarantees of full compliance with the lease and of proper business operation. That is a test of you as the buyer, and it takes months.
Two practical points. On a substitution the lease continues on the existing terms, so you get no fresh term: take over a lease with eighteen months left and eighteen months is what you bought. And which statutory regime applies matters, because it sets your protection on term and eviction. That distinction is worked out in the article on the commercial lease for a salon. Go to the landlord before you sign the purchase agreement, not after.
The client list and the GDPR
The client list is what you are paying the goodwill for, and at the same time the part with the fewest hard rules. The Dutch data protection authority has published no citable position drawing the exact line on when a list may travel with a takeover, so what follows is practice, not law.
The line followed in practice: in a genuine business succession where the business continues in the same place and in the same way, a legitimate interest is assumed, provided the purposes the data were collected for do not change. Where only the list is sold, without the business around it, consent is the safer route.
What holds in both cases: you actively inform clients about the takeover and about their rights. Article 14 GDPR puts a hard deadline on that, because data you did not get from the person directly must be notified within one month at the latest. Agree in the purchase agreement which data transfer, in what form, and that the seller does not keep a copy. Health data that sometimes ends up in a salon file, such as skin conditions or medication, needs a heavier basis, so do not carry it across unthinkingly.
Whether those clients come back remains uncertain, even after the purchase. Which is exactly why step 3 of the sum above weighs so heavily.
What to do in the weeks around the handover
Weeks 1 and 2: letter of intent, due diligence and the trip to the landlord. Make the substitution of tenant or the written consent a condition precedent in the purchase agreement.
Week 3: staff conversations. There is nothing to negotiate, because the terms travel with them, but people who hear it from a letter leave more often.
Week 4: the client announcement and the handover of the diary. Keep the seller alongside you for another four to eight weeks, and put that in writing.
Week 5 onwards: measure. Who came back, with which staff member, and how much of the revenue you paid for is still there after three months.
That last part is where a takeover is usually blind: the seller's figures say nothing about what happens after the handover. In CelerBook you see it per staff member from day one. Every appointment carries a name, every staff member has their own calendar with their own prices and treatment durations, and the client page shows visits and the last appointment per client, so after a quarter you know which part of the client base really came across. For your return there is a quarterly revenue and VAT overview. The pricing scales with the business: the first 5 appointments each month are free, then 0.25 EUR excluding VAT per completed appointment, capped at 30 EUR a month for a solo operator plus 5 EUR per additional active staff member. No contract, and no usage means no cost. Try CelerBook for free.