I reviewed 32 deals over nine months before I bought my salon. And the process of finding it looked a lot less like a business acquisition and a lot more like scrolling Zillow.

I built a Notion notebook where I tracked every deal I was evaluating. Every few days I'd add two or three new businesses to the top of the funnel, then work my way through them. I'd evaluate the publicly available information first. If a deal met enough of my criteria, I'd reach out, sign an NDA, and ask for financials. If it didn't, I'd move on. Over time, my criteria got sharper. The early searches were broad. By the end, I knew exactly what I was looking for, and that precision is what eventually led me to the right deal.

There are two main ways businesses come to market, and understanding the difference will save you a lot of time.

On-market deals are businesses listed publicly for sale. The biggest platform is BizBuySell, which is essentially the Zillow of business acquisitions. There are others (BizQuest, BusinessBroker.net, local broker sites), but BizBuySell is where most people start. You can filter by industry, location, price range, and revenue. Brokers list their clients' businesses here, and owners sometimes list directly.

The advantage of on-market deals is access. You can browse hundreds of businesses from your couch. The disadvantage is competition. Every other person who watched that YouTube video about buying a laundromat is looking at the same listings you are. And because these businesses are publicly listed, the sellers and brokers know they have leverage. Prices tend to reflect that.

One thing I found useful: after connecting with brokers through on-market listings, some of them would tell me about deals they were preparing to bring to market but hadn't listed yet. In a few cases, I was able to review deals before they were publicly available. Building relationships with brokers, even through on-market listings, can give you a head start.

Off-market deals are businesses that aren't publicly listed. The owner might be thinking about selling but hasn't engaged a broker yet. Or they might not even know they want to sell until someone makes the right pitch. You find these through networking, local business associations, accountants and attorneys who work with small business owners, or sometimes just by walking into a business and starting a conversation.

I didn't end up finding my deal off-market, but I knew other buyers who had success through their local chamber of commerce. Chambers are often aware of business owners who are preparing to sell or are in that kind of transitional period. It's worth showing up and building relationships there, even if it takes time.

The advantage of off-market deals is that you're often the only buyer at the table. There's no bidding war, no broker inflating the asking price, and you can build a direct relationship with the seller that leads to better terms. The disadvantage is that it takes real effort and patience. You have to put yourself out there, talk to people, and accept that most conversations won't lead anywhere.

Now, here's what I want you to pay attention to when you're actually evaluating a deal, no matter where you find it.

Use your bullshit detector on the financials. When you get a few years of financials in front of you, look at the trends. Understand why things were going well or going badly, and ask yourself whether the seller's explanation holds up. One of the biggest things to watch for is add-backs. These are expenses that the seller adds back into profitability to make the business look more profitable than the P&L shows on its own. Some add-backs are completely legitimate. Owner compensation or ownership draws are commonly added back, and that makes sense. But there are cases where sellers are adding back expenses that you, as the new owner, would still need to pay. You're not auditing them for the IRS. You're auditing whether you agree with the value they're presenting. If something looks too good to be true, given their explanation, it probably is.

Expect to sign NDAs. Don't expect to pay anything. It's completely reasonable for a seller to ask you to sign a non-disclosure agreement before showing you their books. I signed about 30 NDAs across my 32 deals. That's normal. What is not normal is anyone asking for money, or any commitment or signature beyond an NDA, before you've been able to evaluate the financials. There are unfortunately people out there, brokers and individual sellers alike, who use the business sale process as a way to take money from eager buyers. No money should change hands until you've seen the books and done your homework.

Look at what's NOT in the listing. Lease terms, employee tenure, equipment age, online reviews, customer concentration (is 40% of revenue coming from one client?), pending legal issues, deferred maintenance. None of this is typically in the listing. All of it matters. You'll need to ask for it, and the seller's willingness to be transparent is itself a signal.

Pay attention to the marketing budget. This was one of my most useful filters. When I looked at profit and loss statements, I specifically looked at how much the business was spending on marketing. A low or zero-dollar marketing budget was immediately a clue that told me: I can probably grow this business significantly just by solving this one problem. In our modern era, you need to spend real money on marketing. If a business is currently profitable with no marketing spend, that's not a weakness. That's an opportunity.

As my search progressed, I also started adding criteria that weren't obvious when I began. I covered this in my last issue, but realizing that I didn't want to own a franchise eliminated a huge number of deals overnight. Constraints like that can feel limiting, but they're actually incredibly useful. They save you from wasting time on businesses that would never have been right for you. The same way a home search gets clearer when you realize that the school district matters more than the kitchen, a business search gets clearer when you figure out what you actually care about beyond the numbers.

I'll tell you how I found my specific deal. The salon was listed on BizBuySell, but it was part of a larger package. The seller was offering four salon locations together. I was able to negotiate one of the four locations out of the package deal after getting a look at it. I even explored whether I could stretch my finances to acquire a second location, or even all four. The upside of multiple locations would have been diversification: if one salon struggled, the others might carry it.

But I kept coming back to what I'd learned about key person risk. I was entering an industry I knew nothing about. Each location came with its own staff, and every stylist I lost would take a chunk of recurring revenue with them. I figured I had a much better chance of retaining all of my stylists, and building the trust I needed to grow the business, if I could focus on a single location and be physically present.

That was one of the hardest decisions of the search. Walking away from a financially attractive expansion opportunity because the practical reality of managing it was more risk than I was ready for. But looking back, it was the right call.

The simplest framework I can give you if you're just starting: browse on-market listings to educate your eye. Build relationships with brokers and your local chamber of commerce to find off-market opportunities. Create a system to track and compare deals (even a simple spreadsheet works). Let your criteria evolve as you learn. And for every business that catches your attention, ask two questions before you get emotionally attached: why is the owner selling, and what does the real profit look like after you strip away the add-backs?

The best deal I found was one where the numbers made sense, the answers to my questions were honest, and the opportunity matched what I actually wanted to build. That's the bar.

Michael

I’m building out a suite of products and services to help people like you consider buying or starting then scaling a local small business. If you’re interested in learning more, let me know.