BUYING A BUSINESS

How to Find Profitable Businesses for Sale- And Where Others Don’t Look

Direct sourcing, brokered deals, search criteria, and the marketplaces worth your time in 2025.

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Deal Sourcing — 2 Very Different Ways to Find Deals

Direct DS:

You reach out to privately held companies in hopes that they will sell their business to you.

• Better deals — Usually lower multiples (1x-2x EBITDA) and cheaper asking prices.
• Can form a relationship with the seller. SBF can be much higher if the seller doesn’t want to go through the bank process of getting a loan.
• You have to go digging for information, reports, and statements, and it isn’t already prepared for you. You have to look for everything yourself for due diligence. It can be a tough process if the sellers don’t want to help you out or if they aren’t fully convinced that they want to sell.
• Sellers can back out mid-deal or towards the end of the deal. This sucks — But it happens all the time. Sellers can get cold feet.
• Crazy, labor-intensive, and very overwhelming. This is a full-time job.