You work with a business broker by getting on their buyer list, proving you're financed and serious, and moving faster than the next 20 people looking at the same deal. But before any of that, you need to understand the one thing nobody tells you on the first call: the broker selling you a business doesn't work for you. They work for the seller, and they get paid when the seller wins.
That's not a knock on brokers. It's just the structure. And once you see it clearly, you stop being annoyed by it and start using it. Most first-time buyers treat the broker like a real-estate agent who's on their side. They're not. They're closer to the listing agent — and you're the foot traffic.
What a business broker actually does
A business broker is the intermediary who takes a business to market. The owner wants out, doesn't want to run a sale process themselves, doesn't want their employees or competitors finding out, and doesn't know how to value the thing. So they hire a broker.
The broker does the work the owner can't or won't: prices the business, packages it into a CIM (the confidential information memorandum — the sales doc), lists it on the marketplaces, screens the inbound, runs the buyer process, and shepherds the deal through to close. For that, they take a cut.
Here's the part that matters for you. The broker's whole job is to get the seller the highest price with the least friction. Everything they do points at that. When you're sitting across from one, you're not their client. You're the person they need to extract the best offer from. Friendly, helpful, responsive — and entirely on the other side of the table.
Sell-side vs buy-side — know which one you're talking to
There are two kinds of brokers, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake a new buyer makes.
A sell-side broker (also called a listing broker) is hired by the owner to sell the business. This is the one you'll meet 95% of the time, because they're the ones with the listings. They're paid by the seller, on commission, as a percentage of the sale price. Their incentive is a higher price. Re-read that — their incentive is the exact opposite of yours.
A buy-side broker is hired by you, the buyer, to go find a business that fits what you want — often off-market, owners who never listed. They work for you and you pay them. These are rarer for small deals, and they're not free, but the incentive actually lines up: they get paid when you buy something good, not when you overpay.
For most people buying their first business, the practical reality is this: you'll work mostly with sell-side brokers, because that's where the listings are. Just never forget who signs their check.
What a broker actually costs
The seller pays the broker's fee, not you — but you should understand it anyway, because it shapes how the broker behaves and what a deal can bear.
For small businesses under $1M, brokers typically charge a flat 8% to 12% commission on the sale price. Above that, most brokers move to a tiered structure called the Double Lehman scale: 10% on the first million, 8% on the second, 6% on the third, and so on down. On top of that, most brokers carry a minimum fee of $10,000 to $25,000 regardless of how small the deal is.
So on a typical Main Street business, the broker's cut is roughly a tenth of the whole deal. That's a lot of money riding on the sale closing — which is exactly why they push hard, and exactly why a straight-commission setup incentivizes a broker to sell quickly with the least effort. Useful to keep in mind when they're telling you the deal is hot and three other buyers are circling.
How to actually work with one (so they call you first)
Brokers see a flood of tire-kickers. Most people who inquire on a listing never had the money, never had a plan, and waste everyone's time. So the way you win with a broker is dead simple: be the opposite of that. Be the buyer they remember when the next good deal comes in before it ever hits the marketplace.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
- Get on their buyer list. Brokers keep a roster of pre-qualified buyers and quietly shop the best deals to them before listing publicly. Introduce yourself before you need anything. Tell them exactly what you're looking for.
- Be specific about your buy box. "I'm open to anything" tells a broker you're not real. "$200K-$500K SDE, home services, within 50 miles of Tampa, not owner-dependent" tells them you've done the work — and lets them pattern-match you to listings instantly.
- Show you're financed. Have your proof of funds and SBA pre-qualification ready before you ask to see anything serious. A buyer who's already talked to a lender jumps the line.
- Sign the NDA fast and respect it. The broker's entire relationship with the seller is built on confidentiality. Be the buyer who makes that easy.
- Move fast and communicate. Good deals don't sit. If you go quiet for a week, you're out. Respond same-day, even if the answer is "reviewing, will revert Thursday."
Do those five things and you stop being foot traffic. You become the person the broker calls first — which is the whole game, because the deals that never get listed are usually the best ones.
When to go around them entirely
Here's the thing most buyers figure out too late. The broker market is crowded, picked-over, and slow. The good listings get swarmed. And a huge share of businesses that go up for sale never actually sell — small-business sale success rates sit somewhere around 15% to 30% by most estimates (and even the people quoting that number admit the data is soft, because it mostly comes from brokers themselves).
But that's not even the real opportunity. The real opportunity is the businesses that never get listed at all. The owner who's 64, tired, has no succession plan, and would absolutely sell to the right person — but hasn't called a broker, isn't on any marketplace, and isn't fielding offers. There's no commission to share, no bidding war, no deadline pressure. Just you and an owner having a conversation nobody else is having.
That's off-market direct outreach, and it's where a lot of the best small-business deals come from. I went deeper on that in where the best small-business deals actually come from, and on the full sourcing picture — on-market and off — in how to find a business to buy.
To be clear, this isn't broker-or-nothing. The smart play is both: work the brokers for the on-market deals and run your own off-market outreach for the deals that never hit a listing. The buyers who only do one of those are competing in a small, crowded pool. The ones who do both are seeing deals nobody else even knows exist.
So what do you actually do
Two tracks, run at the same time.
On-market: get on the lists of every broker in your target market and your target industry, qualify yourself hard, and move fast when something fits. That's the easy half — the listings are public (you can browse businesses for sale by state), you just have to be a buyer worth calling.
Off-market: this is where it gets messy, because there's no marketplace for businesses that aren't for sale. You're piecing together who owns what, who's the right age, who's been at it long enough to be thinking about an exit — and then reaching them directly.
That second half is a big reason I'm building DealStratum. It pulls the on-market broker listings from across the sources we track into one deduped feed you can filter to your buy box — so you stop seeing the same listing posted five times across five sites — and it helps you reach the off-market owners who'd sell to the right buyer but never put up a listing. It's not a broker, it doesn't take a commission off your deal, it won't value the business or do your diligence — that part's on you and your advisors. It just makes the finding cover both halves of the market instead of just the crowded one.
Work with brokers. Just go in knowing they work for the other side, knowing what they cost the deal, and knowing that the best business you ever buy might be one no broker ever touched.
DealStratum helps you find and source a business to buy — on-market and off. It's not a broker, a lender, or a financial advisor. Nothing here is investment or financial advice.
Sources
DealStratum · AI Deal Screening
Upload a CIM, get the numbers auto-extracted.
Drop in the PDF. DealStratum pulls SDE and the add-backs, charts the revenue trend, flags customer concentration, and hands you the implied multiple — with a plain-English read on what’s worth a second look.