Stop wasting months on deals that were never going to close
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Quick one for anyone who missed last week’s webinar. I got on a call with an SBA lender and a CPA to answer one question: how do you know if a deal is worth chasing before you spend a dime proving it? Here’s the line I kept coming back to. Walking away is the cheapest decision you’ll make all year. Most first-time buyers don’t lose money on the wrong deal. They lose it paying lawyers, lenders, and accountants to dig into a deal that was never going to survive. I’ve watched a deal die $40,000 into diligence because the buyer and seller were $400,000 apart on working capital. Nobody checked early. So they paid to find out the expensive way. The fix isn’t more diligence. It’s smarter diligence, earlier. Before you sign the LOI. Before exclusivity starts burning. We split it into three cheap screens you can run before you commit: Can it even get financed? One 30-minute lender call kills a bad deal for free. Is anything structurally broken? I walk buyers through a Crash Test — 13 red flags a lawyer can spot in one sitting. Licenses. Customer concentration. The lease. Who’s really holding the business together. Is the seller’s number the real number? It rarely is. There are five signals you can read before you pay for a full quality of earnings report. Two people I shared the stage with, both worth knowing if you’re building a deal team: Matthias Smith at Pioneer Capital Advisory runs the SBA financing side. He’ll tell you in 30 minutes whether a deal is even bankable. pioneercap.com Chris Barrett at Midwest CPA handles quality of earnings — the real numbers behind the seller’s numbers. midwest.cpa If you missed it, two things for you: Grab the free Pre-LOI Diligence Checklist we built Print it. Run it on the next deal that lands in your inbox. Kill the bad ones cheap. Save your money for the one worth buying. — Eric |
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How Not to Close in 2026. Hi Reader Here's what my calendar has looked like for two weeks. LOI. LOI. LOI. Sellers want out before the year ends. So they're bending. One seller this month went soft on price. Then they dropped all the talk about getting paid extra for "upside." A year ago, that fight would have dragged on for weeks and ended in a higher price or a standoff. This time it fit inside SBA's rules in one conversation. It's not just one deal. Seller after seller is agreeing to build...
Hi Reader Most buyers hit the same wall. The business checks out. The lender is warm. Then you look at the equity check. Say you need 10% down on a $2M deal. That’s $200K. Where does it come from? Savings you’d rather not touch. A HELOC on the house your kids sleep in. Or investors who want a slice of a company you don’t even own yet. There’s another pile of money most buyers forget. It’s sitting in an old 401(k). It’s called ROBS. It lets you use retirement money as your equity check. No...
Hi Reader Most buyers hit the same wall. The business checks out. The lender is warm. Then you look at the equity check. Say you need 10% down on a $2M deal. That’s $200K. Where does it come from? Savings you’d rather not touch. A HELOC on the house your kids sleep in. Or investors who want a slice of a company you don’t even own yet. There’s another pile of money most buyers forget. It’s sitting in an old 401(k). It’s called ROBS. It lets you use retirement money as your equity check. No...