Valuation
How to Value a Small Business: the SDE Method, Step by Step
Value a business the way a buyer actually does: calculate SDE from the P&L, pick the multiple (~2.5–2.8x), and adjust for the risk.
9 min read
The DealStratum Blog
Buy your first business
with a fund’s discipline.
Playbooks on sourcing, valuing, financing, and buying small businesses — written for first-time searchers acquiring $1M–$5M companies. No fluff, no jargon for its own sake. Just the moves.
7 categoriesSourcing · Valuation · SBA · Diligence · LOIUpdated weekly
FinancingLive
How to Finance a Business Acquisition: Every Option, Ranked
The full financing stack for buying a small business — SBA 7(a), seller notes, conventional, ROBS, investor equity, mezzanine — ranked by cost and accessibility.
Read the playbook9 min read
Latest playbooks
Newest firstDeal sourcing
How to Work With a Business Broker (and When to Go Around Them)
What a business broker does, who they really work for, what they cost — and the deals they never bring you.
8 min read
Getting started
What Is a Search Fund? The Complete 2026 Guide
A search fund is how a first-time buyer raises money to find, buy, and run one good small business. The 4 phases, 3 flavors, and real economics.
9 min read
Deal sourcing
How to Find a Business to Buy (Past the Listing Sites)
The four real channels for finding a business to buy — and why the best deals get sold off-market before they ever list.
8 min read
Screening deals
What Is a Confidential Information Memorandum (CIM)?
A CIM is the marketing document a sell-side broker writes to sell a business — not an audited financial. Here is what is really inside one and what to do with it.
8 min read
Making offers
The Letter of Intent Template That Decides Whether You Win or Lose the Deal
The LOI is the moment you have the most power in the entire transaction. Most buyers sign it like a formality and spend the next 90 days bleeding away an advantage they didn't know they had.
9 min read
Financing
How Much Money Do You Actually Need to Buy a Business in 2026?
The honest cash-to-close math after the 2025 SBA rewrite — worked examples at $450K, $1M, and $2M, and why the "10% down" promise now has an asterisk.
9 min read
Financing
SBA Loan Requirements in 2026: The Rules Changed and Most of the Internet Didn't Notice
The June 1, 2025 rewrite reset the down payment, the seller note, the ownership rule, and who can sign the appraisal. Here's what you actually need now.
9 min read
Financing
Seller Financing: The 2025 SBA Rule That Still Trips Up Buyers in 2026
Roughly half of small-business sales include it, it can cover 10-60% of the price — but the June 2025 SBA rulebook quietly broke the part everyone was counting on.
8 min read
Getting started
How to Buy a Business: The Underrated Door Out of the Job You Hate
A step-by-step map for buying an existing business instead of starting one from scratch — what each stage actually costs, and where the real risk lives.
8 min read
Buy vs build
"90% of businesses fail" is a lie. And it's keeping you in a job you hate.
The real numbers on starting vs buying a business — and why the path that sounds scariest might be the safe one.
5 min read
Screening deals
How to Read a CIM: The 6 Numbers to Pull and the 4 Sections to Ignore
A confidential information memorandum is a sales brochure, not a balance sheet. Here are the six numbers a trained buyer pulls in the first ten minutes — and the four sections they skip entirely.
9 min read
Deal sourcing
Where the best small-business deals actually come from
On-market listings are crowded and competitive. The deals worth winning are sourced before they ever hit a marketplace — here is how serious buyers find them.
6 min read
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