(FORTUNE Small Business) – Many years ago my father owned a successful seafood restaurant in Montgomery called the S.O.S. Oyster Reef. Dad had a real gift for making folks feel welcome. On any given night you might see anyone from Lady Bird Johnson to the local plumber in there, eating good food and having a great time.

Our little restaurant was a gold mine in those days. A number of people offered to buy it, but Dad always said no. He just couldn't imagine selling the business to which he'd devoted so much of his working life.

Over the years, Montgomery changed without us changing with it. As the city expanded, many new restaurants opened up in the suburbs. We held on to our old location near downtown, but fewer diners were willing to drive there for a meal. We finally closed our restaurant in the early 1990s, after losing lots of money during the final few years.

I've since learned that many entrepreneurs are just like my father: They get so emotionally attached to the business that it's hard for them to step back and see it's time to get out.

I used to work for Cendant, the world's largest franchising company. My job was to grow the Coldwell Banker real estate brand in the Southeast by helping our existing franchisees identify independent real estate brokerages for acquisition.

During the 1990s the U.S. real estate business went through a major wave of consolidation. America had become a far more mobile society. People were relocating more frequently and moving greater distances. Increasingly, people were finding houses on the Internet and through discount brokerages that charged lower fees than local real estate brokers. And the entire real estate industry was investing heavily in technology.

For all these reasons, independent brokers were seeing their costs rise while their profits dropped. Yet it was surprisingly difficult to have a productive conversation with an independent broker about the possibility of selling his company.

Most brokers were unwilling to acknowledge problems in the business for fear of driving down its value. They also had unrealistic ideas about how much their companies were worth. (In the real estate business, after all, your main assets are called agents--they have two feet and can walk away on any given day.) And our franchisees were the independents' competitors: The notion of selling out to a franchisee was humiliating.

In short, the brokers were too emotionally involved with their companies to have an accurate sense of their value. So I learned not to disclose my real intentions right off the bat. I'd simply introduce myself as a senior director for the world's leading franchisor and ask if I could drop by to discuss local real estate trends.

Getting a seller to face the cold, hard facts of business is the first step to building a deal, I learned. The key was finding the entrepreneur's pain, be it rising tech costs or fierce pricing pressure from the national brokerage chains. It hurts to see your profits dropping month after month, even though you just invested $30,000 in new software that was supposed to make you more competitive. It might take seven or eight meetings, but if I could find what was painful to the broker, I could usually persuade him to sell the business while it still had some value.

Which brings me back to my father's restaurant. If I'd known then what I know now, I would have advised Dad to unload the business while he had the chance. But knowing my father, I'm not sure he would have listened. Even though selling would have been a smart move, it's never easy to part with the thing you love.