The short version:
- You need about $150K in savings and decent credit to buy a ~$3M business
- The SBA lends up to $5M at 90% financing for business acquisitions
- Best targets: unsexy businesses (HVAC, landscaping, manufacturing) with owners over 60
- Sourcing is the real work, expect to send hundreds of letters to close one deal but I got a secret weapon
- Full timeline from first letter to closing: 9 to 14 months
A couple of years ago, after going through Y Combinator and spending a few years building startups and hunting for product-market fit on ideas that never quite found it, I got to a decision point. I could raise another round and spend another two years chasing a half-formed idea, or I could go buy something that already worked. I bought a business from a guy who was ready to retire. A lot of founders I know asked me how I did it because this path is not really talked about in startup circles, and the people who do talk about it tend to either be search fund evangelists who make it sound easier than it is, or skeptics who make it sound impossible. The truth is somewhere in between, and the only way I learned where exactly was by doing it. So this is what I wish someone had told me when I was sitting in a coworking space trying to figure out whether this was actually a real option.
The first thing to understand is that buying a small business in the United States right now is one of the strangest opportunities of our generation. There are roughly 2.9 million businesses owned by people over sixty, and most of them have no succession plan. The owners are not running tech companies, they are running landscaping companies and HVAC firms and small manufacturers and accounting practices and pest control routes. These are not glamorous, and most of your founder friends will think you are insane for chasing them, which is part of why the opportunity is still there. If everyone wanted to do this it would already be priced out.
So if you are sitting where I was, here is roughly how I would think about the steps.
1. Decide what kind of acquirer you want to be
The big choice early on is between a traditional search fund, a self-funded search, and what people sometimes call an independent sponsor model. A traditional search fund means you raise about half a million dollars from investors to pay yourself a salary while you look for a business for a year or two, and then those same investors get the right of first refusal on funding the actual acquisition. The benefit is the salary and the credibility you get when you call sellers. The cost is that you give up a lot of the equity, often more than half once you account for the structure, and you are essentially working for a board.
Self-funded search means you skip the investor part and find a business small enough that you can finance it almost entirely with an SBA 7(a) loan plus seller financing plus your own savings. This is what I did, and I think for most founders with some savings and a strong personal credit profile, it is actually the better path even though it sounds harder. You keep all the equity. You move faster. You do not have a board telling you the business is too small or in the wrong industry.
Independent sponsor is a middle road where you find the deal first and then raise capital deal by deal. It works better for people with an existing network of capital and is harder to pull off straight out of school.
You should pick one model and stop reading about the others, because the day to day of executing each is very different and switching halfway through wastes months.
2. Figure out what you can actually afford
Most people skip this step and start looking at deals before they understand their own constraints, which leads to falling in love with businesses they cannot buy. The math for an SBA-backed deal is roughly this. The bank will lend up to five million dollars under the 7(a) program. They will want you to put in around ten percent equity, of which half can come from a seller note that is on standby for at least the first two years. So in practice if you have one hundred and fifty thousand dollars of your own money, you can buy a business with an enterprise value of about three million dollars, which at typical small business multiples of three to four times earnings means a business doing roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand to one million in seller discretionary earnings.
This is the size of business that nobody else seriously wants. It is too small for private equity, too big for a typical individual buyer without a business background, and too unsexy for venture. That is exactly why the opportunity exists in this band.
You will also need cash for the diligence process itself, which can run twenty to fifty thousand dollars by the time you pay for quality of earnings work, legal review, and an environmental study if there is real estate involved. Budget for that separately because it is real money that you spend before you know if the deal will close.
3. Define your criteria with painful specificity
This is the step that separates people who close in twelve months from people who are still searching after three years. When I started I thought I was being specific by saying I wanted a B2B services business with recurring revenue in the Midwest. That is not specific. That describes about forty thousand companies.
What worked for me was writing down ten or fifteen non-negotiables and then sticking to them even when I started to feel desperate. Things like, the business has to have at least seven hundred thousand in SDE, it has to be in a market of at least five hundred thousand people because I want to be able to hire a manager eventually, it has to have a workforce of at least eight people because anything smaller and I am buying a job not a business, the owner cannot be the primary salesperson because then the customer relationships walk out the door with him, and it has to be in an industry where I can plausibly add value, which for me ruled out anything highly technical or licensed that I had no background in.
The point of the list is not that you will find a business that meets every criterion. The point is that the list keeps you honest when a deal you like fails three of them and you start trying to talk yourself into it.
4. Source deals, which is most of the work
People underestimate how much of this game is just at-bats. The brokered market on BizBuySell and similar listing sites is picked over and overpriced, because every seller represented by a broker has been told by the broker that their business is worth a four times multiple. You will look at hundreds of listings to find one or two that are real. So while you should monitor those sites, the real game is direct outreach to owners who are not yet on the market.
The way you do that is you build a list of companies that meet your criteria in your target geography, you find the owners, and you write to them. This sounds simple and it is, but the bottleneck is the list. Building a clean list of, say, every commercial landscaping company in the Phoenix metro with more than ten employees and an owner over fifty-five used to take me a full day a week of scraping and cleaning data. I tried Apollo and a couple of other tools and they all required so much manual work that I was spending more time on data than on outreach.
What ended up working was building my own solution, Overton Collective. I gave it the signals I was looking for, things like industry codes, geography, employee count, owner age proxies, business age, and a few other things, and every morning I would get a list of new prospects in my email and Slack that fit. I did not have to go pull lists, I did not have to clean rows in a spreadsheet, I did not have to figure out which ones were actually still operating. They just showed up, scored, with the contact info already pulled. That freed me up to actually do the outreach, which is the part that matters.
For outreach itself, I sent letters. Actual paper letters in the mail. Cold email works for some people but the response rate to a well-written letter from someone introducing themselves as a founder looking to take over a family business was much higher than email for me, probably five times higher. Owners over sixty respond to mail. They throw away most email. The letter should not be a sales pitch. It should sound like a real person saying, I am looking to buy a business in your industry, I admire what you have built, and if you have ever thought about what comes next I would love to talk.
You should expect to send several hundred letters before you get into serious conversations with five or ten owners. That is the funnel. There is no way around it.
5. The first conversations
When an owner does respond, the first call is not about the business. It is about him. Almost every seller of a business they have run for thirty years is selling something that defines a huge part of their identity, and if you treat the first conversation like an investor pitch you will lose the deal before it starts. Ask about how they got into the business. Ask what they are most proud of. Ask what they would change if they were starting over. Most of these owners have never had anyone ask them these questions in this much detail, and you build trust quickly by listening.
Only after you have built that rapport, sometimes over multiple calls and a site visit, do you start to ask the harder questions. What does a normal week look like for you. How dependent is the business on you personally. Who are your top five customers and what percentage of revenue do they represent. What happens when your number two leaves. These questions tell you whether the business is actually sellable to someone who is not the founder, and a surprising number of small businesses are not.
6. Underwriting and the LOI
Once you have a business that looks real, you need to put a number on it. Small business valuation is much more art than science. The convention is a multiple of seller discretionary earnings, which is essentially EBITDA plus the owner's compensation plus any personal expenses running through the business. Most small businesses in good industries trade for somewhere between two and a half and four times SDE, with the exact number depending on customer concentration, recurring revenue percentage, growth, owner dependence, and the quality of the team underneath the owner.
You write a Letter of Intent that lays out price, structure, the rough split between cash at close and seller financing, an exclusivity period of usually sixty to ninety days, and the major contingencies. The LOI is non-binding except for the exclusivity, which matters because once it is signed, the seller cannot keep shopping the business. That gives you the runway to do real diligence.
7. Diligence
Diligence is where most deals die, and that is fine, because the deals that die in diligence were never going to be good deals anyway. The expensive parts are the quality of earnings analysis, which a small accounting firm specializing in M&A will do for you for somewhere between fifteen and thirty thousand dollars, and the legal work, which depends on your lawyer but should run another fifteen to twenty for a deal of this size. Do not try to save money on the QoE. The whole point is to verify that the earnings the seller claims are actually the earnings the business produces, and you need an independent professional to do that.
Beyond the financial diligence, you are spending these sixty days talking to customers (carefully, often through the seller's introduction so as not to spook anyone), talking to employees, going through contracts, looking at any litigation history, understanding the lease situation if there is real estate involved, and generally trying to find the things that would make you regret signing. Assume there are surprises. There are always surprises. The question is whether the surprises are deal-breakers or just things to negotiate.
8. The SBA process
Run the SBA loan process in parallel with diligence, because the bank will take eight to twelve weeks no matter what and you do not want it to be the gating item at the end. Find a bank that does a lot of SBA acquisition lending, not just any bank. There are maybe two dozen of them in the country that really know what they are doing, and the difference between using one of them and using your local branch of a generalist bank is two months of your life. The SBA loan has a personal guarantee, which is a real thing, not a formality, and your spouse will probably have to sign too. Have that conversation early.
9. Closing and the transition
Closing itself is mostly paperwork once everything else is in place. The harder part is the transition. The standard structure is that the seller stays on for somewhere between three and twelve months in some kind of consulting capacity, partly to transfer relationships and partly because the bank usually requires it. How you structure this matters more than people realize. If the seller stays too long, the employees will keep going to him for everything and you will never actually become the owner in their eyes. If he leaves too quickly, you will be drowning. I think three months of overlap with a clear handoff at the end is about right for most deals.
10. The first hundred days
Do not change anything for the first ninety days that you do not absolutely have to. This is the single piece of advice I got from another acquirer that I think saved my deal. The temptation is to come in with all your startup frameworks and start optimizing everything in week two. The employees are watching you closely and trying to figure out whether you are going to be a reasonable person or a disaster, and every change you make in the first three months gets read as evidence one way or the other. Listen, learn, write things down, build relationships with the longest-tenured employees, and keep the business running. The improvements can wait until you have credibility, which you do not have on day one no matter what your résumé says.
After about a hundred days you will have enough understanding of the actual business to start making real decisions, and you will have enough trust from the team that they will give those decisions a chance. That is when the real work of running the company begins, but if you have done the previous nine steps well, you will be in a good position to do it.
What I Would Pass On
The whole process from first letter to closing took me about fourteen months. I think with what I know now I could probably do it in nine. The biggest lesson I would pass on is that this is much more about process discipline than it is about being clever. Most founders who fail at this fail because they cannot handle the volume of rejection in the sourcing phase, or because they fall in love with a deal that does not meet their criteria, or because they try to negotiate themselves into a structure they cannot actually finance. None of these failures are intellectual failures. They are failures of patience and self-awareness, which are exactly the things startup culture does not teach you and exactly the things owning a business will require of you for the rest of your career.