How buying a business works here.

That is the first conversation we have, and it is a short one. Tell us the industry you know, the size of business your funds and your lender can support, and how far you are willing to travel. We will tell you where those three do not line up — at first they usually don't.

We will not put you in front of a business you have no experience running. It is the fastest way for a buyer to lose money and for a seller to lose a year, and lenders decline those files anyway. If your funding fits but your background does not, we would rather point you at a different sector than take the meeting.

Our listings are published without the company name on them, so what you see first is the industry, the market and the numbers that matter. Ask about one and we send you a confidentiality agreement. Sign it and you get the confidential business review: the real name, the real financials, and why the owner is selling.

After that, a meeting with the seller. We usually hold those off-site or after hours, because the staff do not know the business is for sale and it is our job to keep it that way. Nothing about you reaches the seller before we have qualified you, and nothing about them reaches you before you have signed.

We set it, and we set it the way a lender will. Every business we take on is valued before it is listed, using the same guidelines a bank uses when it underwrites the loan you are about to apply for.

That matters to you more than it sounds. A price a broker invented to win the listing falls apart at the appraisal, and what you lose is the deposit, the diligence and three months. Ask us for the earnings figure the price was built on and how we arrived at it. We will show you, across three years, and a broker who cannot do that is telling you something.

Most small business purchases close on an SBA loan, and we keep a list of lenders who have actually funded acquisitions like the one you are looking at. Approved SBA lenders are not equal, and the wrong one costs you two months before it says no.

We will introduce you to more than one at the same time. We will also get the lender what it needs from the seller's side, which is where these usually stall. One of our brokers spent twenty years in banking making loans to small business owners, so the file that reaches an underwriter is not the first one anyone here has read.

Sooner than most buyers want to. We ask for a letter of intent once you have seen the review and the financials, and we move to a binding purchase agreement straight after it, not at the end of diligence.

Buyers push back on that every time. The reason we push is simple: good businesses draw more than one letter of intent, and until there is a signed agreement the seller is free to take a better one. The agreement is contingent on your financing and on the business appraising, and it carries the protections that let you walk if diligence turns something up. Signing early is not signing blind.

We stay in it. The transition gets written into the deal rather than left to goodwill: how many weeks the seller stays available, how the introductions to customers and suppliers happen, and who tells the staff and when.

That last one is the part buyers underestimate. The employees have not known the business was for sale — on day one they find out from you. Say the jobs are safe, say it in person, and change nothing else for a while. The buyers who struggle are the ones who spend the first month proving they are in charge.