Business Buyers & Search
Buy-side returns in the lower middle market are set at origination: the model matters less than which conversations the buyer can start.
The buyer pool has never been deeper — searchers, independent sponsors, and corporate refugees, with nearly half of Main Street acquisitions closing to first-time buyers — and almost all of it crowds the same brokered inventory while the larger off-market supply retires unapproached.
Industry research
The economics
FIGURES FROM THE FIRM’S RESEARCH · SOURCES ON REQUEST
Growth opportunities
Where the 2× lives
Sourcing as manufacturing
Target universes assembled from primary public records and scored for succession likelihood, so outreach lands on researched owners with the specificity that earns a reply, not another deleted template.
SBA math before the model
Debt-service coverage run at first contact, not first LOI: the DSCR target and equity injection decide feasibility before anyone falls in love, and the SBA’s required independent appraisal enforces the price ceiling a disciplined buyer already set.
Diligence as a data problem
Liens, licenses, WARN notices, benefit filings, and litigation read before the LOI. Diligence quality is a data problem before it is a legal one: the legal phase confirms what the records already said; it does not discover it.
Process that survives the stall
Proprietary deals die of drift, not disagreement. A cadence with dates, staged disclosure, and offer discipline designs the exchange end to end — and keeps a retiring owner moving through the only sale they will ever run.
Our perspective
What most firms get wrong
A sharper model on the same channel
The reflex under competition is analytical — a better model, faster diligence, a higher certainty of close — pointed at the same brokered flow as every other buyer. But the auction prices out the second buyer: the underbidder sets the price and the winner signs the edge away. Modeling skill applied to auctioned inventory is how disciplined buyers overpay precisely.
Where we’d start
Three CIMs the buyer recently passed on, re-read with the reasons why. Then the thesis reduced to a screenable definition, the target universe counted from public records with succession signals ranked, and the SBA feasibility math run at realistic pricing — before the first owner call.
Put it to us