Your buyer’s financing question, answered before they ask it.
An SBA pre-qualification means our lending partners have already reviewed your business and will back an SBA loan for a qualified buyer. You take that to market with your listing. There’s no cost to you to find out; we’re paid only if your eventual buyer finances through us.
Request Pre-QualificationMost businesses are listed carrying a question nobody has answered: can a buyer actually get funded for this?
It gets answered eventually; in week eight of diligence, by a bank that has never seen a deal like yours, after you’ve taken the business off the market and told your key people something is happening. If the answer comes back no, you’re not renegotiating. You’re relisting.
A buyer who can’t get financed can’t buy at your number. That makes your buyer’s financing your problem, whether you want it to be or not.
Pre-qualification moves the question to the front of the process, where it’s still cheap to answer.
An SBA pre-qualification is a review of your business by SBA lenders, arranged before you list, that establishes whether the business will support an SBA 7(a) loan for a qualified buyer.
We assemble your financials and business information, package them the way SBA lenders need to see them, and put them in front of lending partners whose credit appetite fits a business like yours. What comes back is the lending partners’ answer on whether the business will support SBA financing.
Two things worth being precise about:
- It’s the lenders’ review, not our opinion. We arrange and package it. The lending partners do the reviewing, and they make every credit decision. That’s what gives the answer weight — it isn’t a broker’s enthusiasm or our assessment of your company. It’s the people who write the loans, telling you what they’ll support.
- It’s about the business, not the buyer. A pre-qualified business still needs a qualified buyer. What pre-qualification removes is one of the two unknowns in every financed deal — and it’s the one you can do something about before you go to market.
It runs about 90 days. If the sale takes longer, it gets refreshed. That’s routine, not a red flag.
It costs you nothing. No fee, no retainer, no upfront cost. We’re paid a referral fee on the loan only if your eventual buyer finances through us — disclosed on SBA Form 159. If the business doesn’t sell, or your buyer pays cash, or they finance somewhere else, you’ve paid nothing.
- It widens your buyer pool. Buyers who don’t have the full purchase price in cash can compete credibly. More qualified bidders means more competition for your business, and competition is what moves terms.
- It sets a price a financed buyer can actually pay. What a lender will support is the real ceiling on what most buyers can offer. Pre-qualification turns an asking price into a fundable one, before you anchor on a number the market can’t reach.
- It differentiates the listing. Most businesses for sale carry that open financing question. Yours won’t.
- It surfaces the fixable problems while they’re still fixable. Customer concentration — one or two accounts carrying too much of your revenue — a soft EBITDA trend, books a lender won’t accept as presented. These are far better found in the weeks before you list than in the weeks after you accept an offer. Some we can address in how the business is presented. Some you’ll want six months to fix. Either way, you want to know now.
- It shortens the closing timeline. When the business has already been reviewed, your buyer’s loan starts from a package that exists rather than from scratch. Less time between accepted offer and funded deal is less time for a deal to fall apart.
We’ve been placing SBA acquisition financing since 1996 — more than $1 billion in transactions funded by our lending partners, and a 94% historical close rate on issued commitment letters, meaning deals that reached a lender’s written offer to fund and then closed. Here’s what that experience buys you before you go to market.
We know what each SBA lender actually wants.
We’re not a bank, and we don’t lend — we’re SBA specialists who place deals with a nationwide network of lending partners. Each has its own appetite: industries it likes and industries it won’t touch, deal sizes, tolerance for goodwill — the part of a purchase price that isn’t hard assets — and for thin collateral, comfort with first-time buyers. Two lenders looking at your identical business will reach opposite conclusions, and both will be acting rationally. Your own bank has exactly one credit box; if your business doesn’t fit it, the answer is no and you learn nothing. We know the shape of every box in our network.
We know how the business needs to be presented.
In our experience, roughly 84% of rejections come down to presentation, not fundamentals — the deal was financeable and the package didn’t show it. Add-backs — the owner expenses that overstate what a new owner’s costs will be — left undocumented. A revenue trend with no explanation attached. A concentration nobody addressed. We don’t just submit files. We position them.
We’ll tell you the truth about what’s financeable.
We get paid when a deal closes with financing. An inflated pre-qualification produces a dead deal and no fee, so we have no reason to tell you your business will support more than it will. If something is going to give a lender trouble, you’ll hear it from us early — including when the honest answer is that this isn’t the right moment to go to market.
We’re fast, and we’re used to being asked.
Our average time to a preliminary commitment is three days. When your buyer shows up, we can put them through the same exercise — an Opinion Letter setting out our view that a buyer of that profile can finance the deal. It’s an opinion, not an approval; the lender still makes that call. Turnaround on those has averaged two to four hours, which makes it a negotiating tool rather than paperwork.
We work in all 50 states, across business acquisitions, franchise resales, and partner buyouts.
Pre-qualification is a launch step, not a preparation step
The 90-day clock starts the day it’s issued, so time it to when the business is genuinely ready to go to market — not months before.
Here’s the documentation SBA lenders will want. Having it assembled is most of the work.
- Three years of business financials: CPA-prepared statements and/or business tax returns.
- Interim financials for the current year, plus the same period last year for comparison.
- An add-back schedule: Documented, not estimated.
- Revenue detail and customer concentration: Your customer mix and supplier mix. If one customer is 30% of revenue, a lender will find it. Better that you raise it first, with the context.
- Equipment list, key contracts, and key employees including who stays and who leaves.
- Recent revenue and EBITDA trends, and the explanation. Up or down. Lenders will see the numbers either way; what they can’t see without you is why.
- Contingencies disclosed: Current or potential litigation, environmental issues, anything diligence would surface.
- A transition plan, and a view on whether seller financing makes sense for you. How a seller note is structured has a direct effect on whether your buyer can close, and the SBA’s treatment of seller notes has been revised recently — worth a conversation against the current rules before you commit to anything in a listing.
Not all of it has to be perfect. Bring what you have and we’ll tell you what’s missing.
Find out what a lender will support.
Before you list.
It takes a conversation and your financials. It costs you nothing. And it answers the one question that decides whether your sale closes at your number or doesn’t close at all.
Request a Pre-Qualification