Most business owners picture a buyer as a private equity or a strategic acquirer. If you run a smaller business in a niche category, your most likely buyer may be an individual — not a fund, not a conglomerate, but a person who likes what you’ve built and is willing to put real skin in the game to buy it.
In this week’s Built to Sell Radio, Joe Soelberg joins the Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series and breaks down what that kind of buyer actually looks like, including how these deals get financed and what sellers consistently get wrong about the process.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to:
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Recognize the difference between a real buyer and “capital partners” theater
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Ask for proof of capacity without making the process adversarial
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Use a seller note as a credibility filter, not just a concession
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Understand the most common structure for individual buyers — cash down, seller note, bank debt — and why sellers routinely misread it
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Surface risk early, before you’ve committed months to legal work
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Read what a buyer’s attitude toward zero-to-one businesses tells you about how they’ll evaluate yours
Quote of the Week
I would never know how to do a zero to one.
Deals
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Freedom Pools, a fiberglass pool manufacturer and installer operating in Australia and New Zealand, sold to Latham Group, Inc. for approximately $17 million. The business generated about $20 million in revenue and roughly $4 million in EBITDA, implying a valuation of about 4.25x EBITDA.
