Lessons from a Year of Dealmaking

Hey there entrepreneurs,

Welcome to the Better Business Brief, where I share takeaways from:

running businesses I’m building to sell for millions
My advisory with other business owners building to sell for millions
tips and tricks you can use to do the same

Last night marked one year of DealFlow Live — a weekly show I co-host where we dissect the world of buying and selling businesses. We started it to learn out loud. A year later, we’re not just talking about deals.

We’re doing them. We did an episode going over everything we’ve learned over the last year of this…

So today, in less than 5 minutes, I’ll give you:

📉 Why SBA Lending is Failing Us

🔁 What Options We Have to Replace Them

📦 Lessons from Our First Year of Doing Deals Publicly

Let’s dive in…

🚫 SBA Lending Is Falling Apart

If you’re trying to buy a business in 2025, SBA loans are no longer your easy button.

Departments are downsized. Processing times are brutal. Underwriting is more conservative than ever. We’ve seen deals fall apart mid-process because the loan officer changed or the bank pulled out.

So we asked ourselves… how do serious buyers buy businesses now without having all the cash on hand?

The answer: We build an alternative.

On the brokerage side of what I do, we now have an option to help sellers who can’t get their business funded by SBA to be acquired…

✅ A Smarter Seller-Financing Alternative

We launched a new deal structure that gives the feel of an SBA loan, without the bureaucracy.

Here’s how it works:

💸 Buyers still put down 10% like SBA requires
🧾 The rest is paid over time (seller financing style), but with a transitionalmanagement company intermediary
📊 The transitional management company becomes the temporary accounting department and gatekeeper of the bank account during the transition
🛡️ If the buyer doesn’t hold up their end at any point, the seller immediately gets the business back

This structure:

Protects the seller
Reduces the buyer’s cash burden
Doesn’t have ridiculous and irrelevant hoops to jump through like the SBA
Can close in 2-3 weeks, not 4-5 months (like the SBA)

And it was designed with advising from one of our closest SBA lending partners — someone who’s seen what’s broken on the inside.

🧠 The Deal Lessons We’ve Learned This Year

After a full year of looking at, underwriting, negotiating, and closing deals, here are a few things we wish we knew from day one:

On-Market Listings Are a Trap for First-Time Buyers
Broker-listed deals are often overpriced, slow-moving, and come with hoops. Your best shot is off-market unless you are sitting on massive cash reserves. But even if you are, it doesn’t make sense from the perspective of an investor to put it all down to buy a business in all cash.
You Need a Tight Deal Box
Don’t look at every “pretty” business. The more you know the exact industry, EBITDA, and cash flow profile that works for you — and only pursue that, the more successful you’ll be in actually making something happen.
Bigger Businesses are Easier to Buy than Smaller Businesses
You’ll get the same headaches for half the payoff trying to buy a micro-sized business. Bigger is often better because banks and investors are more interested in actually being part of it.
Bring Value First. Get Equity Later
We have a community where we work on this stuff behind closed doors. Our community member Lawrence (age 18!) brought his marketing chops to a cleaning business and earned 40% equity without writing a single check. There are ways to acquire a business without buying in.

📣 Real Talk: Be the Operator Before You’re the Owner

The M&A space is flooded with “spreadsheet buyers.” But businesses are not spreadsheets.

They’re people. Systems. Chaos. And they require hands-on leadership to grow.

That’s why we show up as operators first. We fix things. We help. We create new options.

Then? We earn the right to own.

If you didn’t catch the full episode where we covered these things in depth, watch it here. Find and message me on Instagram at @brodyvinson.io if you have a business you want to buy and need help negotiating and closing the deal.

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Happy value-building to you!

See you next time for Better Business Brief,

-Brody