Frequently Asked Questions

Start with three things you can answer today: what you want to be doing every day, how much income you need to live on, and how much cash you could put into a purchase. The free Business Fit assessment covers the first one and gives you a shortlist of the kinds of business that fit you. The free Financial Fit assessment covers the other two and figures out the price range worth your time. You do not need a listing in front of you for either one.

Think about the work you want and the work you want to leave. Owning a business can mean managing staff, chasing customers, and taking a call about a broken van at nine at night. The Business Fit assessment asks how you actually like to work and shows you which kinds of business ask for that. What it cannot tell you is whether you will enjoy owning one, or whether you will be good at it. Nothing you fill in on a website can tell you that.

Yes. You can read listings, talk to brokers and talk to a lender while you are still employed. It gets real closer in. A lender will ask who runs the business day to day after close, and most businesses this size need somebody in the building. If that person is not you, put their pay in your budget before you make an offer. Ask your lender what they expect early, because their answer decides your last day at work.

Age is not what decides it. What decides it is how many months you could go without income if the first year is slow, whether anybody else has to sign off on the decision, and whether you still want to be doing this in ten years. All three are worth an hour before you start looking.

Yes, and you should read the result together. Agree early on how much each of you puts in, who does the work, who decides what, and what happens if one of you wants out. Have a lawyer write the ownership down before any money moves. The Business Fit assessment asks whether you are buying with someone, and you can send them a copy of your results so they can take it too and see where you agree.

Six to eighteen months to find the right business, then 45 to 90 days to close once you have agreed on one. Most people budget about six weeks for the second part and are surprised. Nobody tells them about the first part at all. Financing, document review and negotiation all move the closing date, so ask your lender and your lawyer for a date based on your own deal before you make plans around it.

For a business around $500,000, somewhere between $98,000 and $155,000 in cash on closing day. The spread is the part nobody explains. The SBA minimum is ten percent, and it is ten percent of everything the deal costs rather than ten percent of the price, which is already more than the $50,000 you will be quoted. Ten percent is a floor, not the number, and lenders often ask a first-time buyer for fifteen or twenty. On top of that you need a cushion for your own household while the first months are slow. The Financial Fit assessment figures out your version, and your lender will confirm what your deal actually needs.

There is no single number, and anybody who gives you one is telling you about their own lender rather than about a rule. Lenders set their own bar, they differ, and a first-time buyer usually finds it higher than the numbers that circulate online. Ask two or three of them early. If they all say no, the deal has to be cash, mostly seller financed, or backed by a partner who qualifies. Nothing on this site can tell you whether a lender will say yes.

It means you sign for the loan yourself, and not only as the business. If the business cannot pay, the lender can come after you for what is still owed. Almost every business this size is bought with one. If that sentence frightens you, that is the correct reaction and not a sign you are not cut out for this. What your own guarantee covers is written in the document, and that document is one your lawyer should read before you sign it. We will never tell you what yours puts at risk, because we have not read it and we are not your lawyer.

Ask, then check whether the records agree with the answer. Look at earnings for the last three years, customers who left, who has quit, and how much of the work the owner does himself. Often the business is fine and the seller is tired. Retirement and burnout are real reasons to sell. Neither of them tells you whether the business is worth buying.

It means the earnings figure pays nobody to do them. Here is the arithmetic. A landscaping company is listed at $500,000 and says it earns $168,000. The owner sells the work, runs the crews and keeps the books. Somebody has to do all of that after you buy it. If that somebody is a manager, and we put a manager in that business at $62,000, then it really earns $106,000 before you have negotiated a dollar off the price. If that somebody is you, the job is still real. It is just being paid out of the same $168,000. The question that gets you the answer is short. What does the owner do in a week, and who does each of those things after close?

There are two questions in there and only one of them is arithmetic. First, does the money still work once somebody is paid to do the owner's job? Take that pay out of the earnings before you look at the price. If nothing is left, you are buying a job, whatever the listing calls it. Second, is it a job you want? Some people do want to buy themselves a job, and the first question of the Business Fit assessment has an answer for exactly that. Choosing it is not the wrong answer. Buying yourself a job is fine as long as you chose it. What you do not want is to pay a business price for a job.

Treat it as the seller's arithmetic, not as a fact. It starts with the profit on the books, then adds back costs the seller says a new owner would not have. Some of those are fair. A one-time legal bill is not going to happen again. Some are not. A salary for work somebody still has to do is not money you get to keep. Neither is a truck the business actually needs. One request makes most of it visible. Ask for the seller's own list of what was added back, with an amount against each line, and have an accountant check it against the tax returns before you rely on any of it.

A lender first, before you make an offer, because the price has to be one a bank will actually fund and asking is the only way to know. A lawyer once there is a document to sign, starting with the letter of intent, which is the first paper that sets out the price and the terms. An accountant to check the seller's numbers against what was really filed, once a listing has survived everything cheaper than an accountant. In the sample review we publish for free, the accountant is scoped at $6,000 to $9,000 and the lawyer at $4,000 to $7,000. That is one deal, not a price list. We come before all three, and our job is deciding whether a listing deserves any of them. We are not a substitute for one and we will never tell you that you do not need one.

The assessments are about you. The Business Fit assessment asks how you like to work and gives you a shortlist of the three kinds of business that fit. The Financial Fit assessment figures out the price range your cash and your household budget can carry. Owner Readiness is still being built, and it will show what you would bring to the owner's job. Deal Fit is about one listing. You paste the link or upload the listing, and the report compares it with what the assessments found and recommends a next step, such as emailing the broker. Your first Deal Fit report is free once you have taken the Business Fit and Financial Fit assessments.

There is no password and no card. Eighteen questions about how you work, and your result is on the screen. You do not have to give us an email to see it. If you want your results sent to you, or saved so you can open them on another device, you give us an address on the result screen. If you buy something you get an account, because what you bought has to live somewhere. It still has no password.

In your account, under the deal they belong to. A deal is one business you are looking at. Every Deal Fit report you run on that listing lands on the same page, so running it again next month when the broker sends more does not start a second one. You can put anything else you collect on it: the broker's write-up, the profit and loss, the lease, tax returns, photos of pages somebody sent you. You can set what stage it is at, write down the asking price, and when you pass on one, write down why. Six months and twenty listings in, the reason you passed is the useful part.

Nothing you upload is public and none of it sits on a page anybody can find. To open a file you have to be signed in as you, and the link the site builds for it expires in a minute. We do read the documents on a Deal Read, because reading them is what you paid for. Anything else you file on a deal is yours, and there is no page on this site that shows it to anybody but you. You can delete any file from the deal page, and one click in any email we send deletes them along with everything else we hold on you. We also delete them ourselves on a clock: ninety days after you mark a deal Passed, and two years after anything last happened on one. You get an email fourteen days before either of those, and opening the deal and working on it starts the clock over. Holding a stranger's tax returns forever is not something we are willing to do quietly.

A chat model will read a listing and hand you a number, and it will sound just as certain when the number is wrong. Here the model only reads and writes. Every figure is calculated by the same code that runs the free Cash at Close calculator, and you can check any of it there for nothing. The model reads and the code decides. A Deal Fit report will also tell you when the listing does not say enough to answer, which is the most common thing wrong with a listing this size. If you would rather paste it into a chat window first, do that. Come back when you want to know whether the arithmetic holds.

You pay, and the next screen asks for the documents. Send the broker's memorandum and the profit and loss for the last two or three years, plus tax returns if you have them, and tell us what is already worrying you. If the broker has not released those yet, which is normal until you sign their confidentiality agreement, send the listing and check the box that says so. We hold your order and nothing expires. Two people read it by hand, and then one of us spends twenty minutes on a call going through it with you before it comes to you. Say the word and you can skip the call and have the document the same day instead. You get a PDF back and an email the moment it is ready. It explains what the business really earns, whether it covers the loan, what we could not see, and five questions to take back to the seller. If the documents do not contain enough for a real answer on the numbers, that is the finding. You get the review anyway, with the exact list to send back to the broker.

They cannot tell you whether the seller's numbers are true, because nobody has checked them against a tax return. They cannot tell you what the business is really worth, because the price is a negotiation rather than a calculation. They cannot tell you whether the customers stay, because that lives in the contracts and the relationships and no listing shows it. They cannot tell you whether the lease, the licenses or the staff transfer, because those are documents and they come after an offer. And they cannot tell you whether to buy it. That one is yours, and anybody who sells you a number that makes the decision for you is selling you something.