The seller has a broker.
You should too.
Every listing you look at was priced, packaged and positioned by somebody working for the other side. Buy-side representation puts the same discipline on your side of the table: what the business is actually worth, whether the earnings survive scrutiny, and what the deal has to look like for the debt to service.
Off-market opportunities go to the list before they are advertised.
Most buyers only ever see
a sliver of the market.
Roughly ten thousand businesses are listed for sale nationwide at any given moment, and no individual buyer reads them. You watch two or three sites, you get a weekly digest, and you end up competing for whatever was easiest to find, against everyone else who found it the same way.
The businesses actually worth buying are often not in that pile at all. They belong to owners who would take the right conversation and have never called a broker.
Criteria first, then the search, then the arithmetic.
A buy box specific enough to say no with: industry, earnings range, geography, how much of the operation you intend to run, and what you can actually finance.
Matched against what we have listed, against the national inventory by AI tooling that scores every new listing on your specific criteria, and against owners we approach directly on your behalf.
The hard questions asked early, in the order that kills deals cheapest first, so you are not thirty thousand dollars into diligence learning it was always a no.
Letter of intent through closing with litigation counsel reading the contract, not a referral you meet for the first time at the table.
The buy box decides
everything after it.
Vague criteria produce a search that never converges. These are the six answers that turn a wish into a filter, and the ones a lender will ask you for anyway.
Industry
What you know, what you can learn, and what you will not touch. Lenders underwrite the overlap between your background and the business, so this is not only a preference.
Earnings range
Stated in SDE or EBITDA rather than revenue. Revenue tells you the size of the company. Earnings tell you what the debt can be and what is left for you.
Geography
How far you are willing to drive on a Tuesday. Absentee ownership at this size is usually a story buyers tell themselves in the first year and stop telling in the second.
Your role
Running it yourself, or buying one with a general manager already in place. This single answer moves the price, the risk, and the pool of businesses that fit.
Capital
Injection, closing costs, and working capital, counted separately. The third one is where first-time buyers run out of room.
Timeline
When you can move, and what you are prepared to wait for. A search with a deadline finds a business. A search with criteria finds the right one.
The best company for you
may not be for sale yet.
A buy-side engagement means we go looking rather than waiting. We build a target list against your criteria, approach owners directly and confidentially, and find out which of them would consider a conversation. Most say no. The ones who say yes are a market of one, with no competing bidders and no auction dynamics.
The approach is rarely cold. Tailored newsletters go out to a database of more than 25,000 industry contacts, CPAs, attorneys, lenders and other brokers, which is usually where you hear that an owner has started thinking about it long before anybody lists. That, plus 12,000 followers on LinkedIn, is how most off-market conversations actually begin.
It is slower than reading listings and it is the only way to buy a business nobody else is bidding on.
Target list. Owners in your industry, in your geography, at your size, built from public records and the network rather than from what is advertised.
Direct approach. Confidential outreach that never names you until the owner has expressed genuine interest and signed.
Qualification. Financials before feelings. An owner who will not share three years of numbers is not a seller yet.
Valuation. An independent read on what it is worth, which matters more when there is no asking price to argue against.
Structure. The offer built around what the lender will fund and what the seller actually needs, which is often not the highest number.
One buy box against
ten thousand listings.
The section above is about businesses nobody has listed. This is the opposite problem: the national inventory is enormous, it changes daily, and reading it is not work a person can do. So a person does not do it.
Your buy box goes in once: industry, earnings range, geography, owner involvement, and what you can finance.
The system reads the national listing inventory, on the order of ten thousand businesses, and re-reads it as it changes.
Every listing is scored against every live buy box we hold. Not skimmed, not filtered on price and state, scored on the criteria that actually decide whether a deal is worth your diligence budget.
Matches reach you the same day, with the arithmetic already run, so you are asking about terms while other buyers are still asking for the teaser.
We built this for our own desk. Watching the market by hand does not scale past a handful of buyers, and the ones we were carrying deserved better than whenever somebody got round to it.
It worked well enough that other brokers asked for it. That is how the AI division of this firm started: a system built to solve our own problem, proven on our own transactions, and only then offered to anyone else. It is now licensed to brokerages who want to give their buyers the same thing.
Which is worth knowing as a buyer for one reason: the tool matching you against the market is the product we sell to our competitors, not a spreadsheet somebody updates on Fridays.
Most acquisitions are
financed, not funded.
Buyers routinely assume they need far more cash than a deal actually requires. The structures below get combined, and the combination is usually what makes an acquisition possible at all.
The backbone of most deals this size
Ten years fully amortizing on the business, longer when real estate is included, with a buyer injection typically in the ten to fifteen percent range. We work a vetted set of 7(a) lenders rather than whoever answers, because the same deal gets underwritten differently depending on who reads it, and knowing which desk to take it to is most of the job.
The seller stays invested in your success
A portion of the price carried by the seller, sometimes on full standby, which can count toward your injection. Negotiating one well does two jobs at once: it finances part of the purchase and it keeps the seller invested in the transition. Having sat on the seller side of this twice, Nolan negotiates the note to protect you without blowing up the deal.
Financed separately from the purchase
Rolling stock, machinery and a working capital line handled outside the acquisition note so the first ninety days do not consume the cash you needed for the closing table.
When the deal is bigger than the balance sheet
Investors who fund part of the equity in exchange for a share of the business. It lowers what you have to put in and changes who you answer to, which is a trade worth making deliberately. For larger deals we have private equity relationships that can take the piece a single buyer cannot.
Terms vary by lender, industry and collateral. The affordability model on the home page runs the arithmetic on a ten year note so you can see how price, injection and rate move debt service coverage before you talk to anybody.
What buyers actually ask
on the first call.
How much cash do I actually need to buy a business?
Less than most buyers assume, and more than the headline injection suggests. An SBA 7(a) acquisition typically wants ten to fifteen percent equity from the buyer, and part of that can sometimes come from a seller note held on standby. What catches people out is everything the injection does not cover: closing costs, the guaranty fee, and working capital for the first few months, when receivables from the previous owner are still collecting and payroll is already yours. Model the working capital before you model the down payment.
Do I pay you, or does the seller?
It depends on which side of the deal you found. If you buy a business we have listed, the seller pays the success fee and you pay nothing. If you engage us to go find something that is not on the market, that is a buy-side engagement with its own fee structure, agreed in writing before we start. What does not happen is us collecting from both sides of the same transaction without you knowing about it.
What is a quality of earnings review and do I need one?
It is an independent examination of whether the earnings you are buying are real, repeatable, and yours after closing. It tests the add-backs, the revenue recognition, the customer concentration, and the working capital the business actually needs to run. On a deal above roughly a million dollars it is close to mandatory, and a lender may require it anyway. The point of asking the hard questions early is that a full review costs real money, so you want the obvious problems surfaced before you spend it.
How long does an acquisition take?
Three to six months from signed letter of intent to funding on a typical SBA deal, and the search that precedes it takes as long as it takes. Buyers who set a deadline for the search usually buy the wrong company. Buyers who set criteria and wait usually do better, because the constraint that matters is fit rather than time.
Can I buy the real estate with the business?
Often, and on an SBA 7(a) it can be an advantage: real estate in the deal can extend the loan term, which lowers the monthly payment and improves your debt service coverage. The alternative is leasing from the seller, which keeps the purchase price down but leaves you exposed at renewal. Because the commercial side is under the same roof here, both versions get modeled together rather than by two brokers negotiating past each other.
What if I have never run a business before?
That is most first-time buyers, and lenders know it. What they underwrite is whether your background maps onto the business you are buying: managing people, managing a P&L, and knowing the industry or something close to it. It changes which businesses are realistic rather than whether you can buy one. An owner-dependent company with no management layer is a different proposition from one with a general manager already in place, and the second is usually the right first acquisition.
Tell us the buy box.
We will tell you what is out there.
Forty minutes on what you are looking for, what you can finance, and whether the businesses you have been sent are worth your diligence budget. No engagement comes out of it.