How to Find a Business to Buy
A Practical Guide to ETA Deal Sourcing
5 min read • February 2026
Ask anyone who has gone through the ETA process what surprised them most, and a significant number will say the same thing: finding the business was much harder than they ever expected.
If you’re new to the concept, start with What Is Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition? for the full overview. If you’ve already read that and you’re trying to understand how the search model fits your situation, Self-Funded Search vs. Traditional Search Fund covers that decision in depth.
This post is for the next step: you understand what ETA is, you’ve thought about your search model, and now you want to know how people actually find businesses to buy. The honest answer is that it’s a grind. Knowing where to look and how to stand out makes a big difference in a competitive space.
Two Types of Deal Flow: On-Market and Off-Market
Before getting into the specific channels, it helps to understand the fundamental distinction between on-market and off-market deals, because your sourcing strategy should include both, and they require very different approaches.
On-market deals are businesses formally listed for sale, usually through a business broker or on a deal marketplace. They’re easier to find but harder to win. Every other searcher is looking at the same listings, which means more competition, higher asking prices, and sellers who have been coached by brokers to maximize value. Not impossible, but you’re rarely getting a deal on a well-marketed business.
Off-market deals are businesses not formally listed, where you’re approaching owners directly. They’re harder to find but often better opportunities — less competition, owners who haven’t yet been primed on maximizing sale price, and more room to build a genuine relationship before money enters the conversation. The best searchers treat direct outreach as their primary channel, not a secondary one.
Most successful acquisitions involve elements of both. The question is where you spend the majority of your time.
Channel 1: Business Brokers
Business brokers are the most obvious starting point and worth understanding, even if they shouldn’t be your only channel. A broker represents the seller (not you) and their job is to get the best price and terms for their client. Period.
That said, brokers control a significant portion of deal flow in the lower middle market, and building genuine relationships with active brokers in your target geography and industry can get you early looks at deals before they’re widely marketed. The International Business Brokers Association (IBBA) has a broker directory and publishes the Market Pulse Report quarterly — useful for understanding current deal volume, multiples, and what’s moving in the market.
How to work with brokers effectively:
Be specific about your criteria upfront — industry, geography and EBITDA threshold. Vague buyers get deprioritized.
Follow up consistently. Brokers work with hundreds of buyers and you need to stay top of mind without being annoying.
Show you’re serious and fundable. Brokers will only bring you quality deals if they believe you can actually close.
Don’t rely on them exclusively. The best deals often don’t go through brokers at all.
Channel 2: Online Deal Marketplaces
Online marketplaces are the most accessible entry point for new searchers, and they have real value, particularly for understanding the market and getting your first reps evaluating businesses. Don’t dismiss them, but don’t over-rely on them either.
BizBuySell — the largest and most widely used marketplace for smaller, owner-operated businesses. Good for deal volume and market awareness. Heavily trafficked by other buyers, so quality deals move fast and pricing reflects competition.
Axial — more focused on lower middle market deals in the $5M–50M enterprise value range. Better signal-to-noise ratio than BizBuySell but more appropriate for larger targets.
Acquire.com — skews toward online businesses and SaaS. Worth knowing about if your thesis includes digital-first businesses.
DealStream — broad marketplace, high noise-to-signal ratio. Use selectively.
A word of honest caution: the best businesses rarely sit on these platforms for long. If they have been on the platform for a long time, there’s probably a reason for it. If you’re only sourcing through marketplaces, you’re fishing in the most crowded pond. Use them to build deal evaluation skills and market knowledge but invest serious time in the channels below.
Channel 3: Direct Outreach to Business Owners
This is the channel that separates serious searchers from casual ones. Direct outreach (reaching out to business owners who have not listed their business for sale) is harder, slower, and more uncomfortable than browsing a marketplace.
The premise is straightforward: millions of small business owners are approaching retirement with no clear succession plan. Many owners haven’t even thought seriously about an exit, until someone calls them.
How direct outreach actually works:
Build a target list of businesses that fit your criteria — industry, geography, estimated size, years in operation. Tools like LinkedIn, local chamber of commerce directories, and industry association member lists are free starting points. More advanced searchers use platforms like Grata or SourceScrub to build highly specific lists at scale.
Reach out via letter, email, or phone with a clear, honest message. You’re an operator looking to acquire a business in their industry. You’re not a private equity firm. You’re not looking to flip the business. You want to run it.
Expect a low response rate. A 2–5% response rate on cold outreach is considered normal. That means for every 100 letters you send, you might have 2–5 conversations. Most of those won’t go anywhere. This is a volume and patience game.
Play a long game. Many deals from direct outreach take 12–18 months from first contact to signed LOI. You’re planting seeds, not harvesting immediately.
The operators who close good deals off-market are almost always the ones who started outreach 12 months before they needed to. If you’re waiting until you’re ‘ready’ to start reaching out, you’re already behind.
Channel 4: Your Personal Network
Don’t underestimate how many deals come through people you already know, or people one degree removed from you. Accountants, attorneys, bankers, financial advisors, and commercial real estate brokers all have client relationships with business owners who are thinking about their next chapter. These intermediaries are often the first to hear about a potential sale, months before a broker is engaged.
Tell people what you’re doing. Be specific about what you’re looking for. Most people want to be helpful if they know how. Join ETA communities like Searchfunder where other searchers and operators are actively sharing deal flow and making introductions.
The Honest Reality of Deal Sourcing
Here’s the part that tends to get glossed over in ETA content: most deals fall apart. You will spend weeks on a business that goes nowhere. You will get to LOI and have it fall through. You will find a great company with an owner who isn’t actually ready to sell, no matter what they said in the first conversation.
The searchers who close good deals are almost always the ones who built a systematic, multi-channel sourcing process and stuck with it consistently over time — not the ones who got lucky on the third business they looked at. Treat deal sourcing like a job, because during the search phase, it is.
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Key Takeaways
Deal sourcing is the hardest part of ETA — plan for it to take longer than you expect
On-market deals (brokers, marketplaces) are accessible but competitive — don’t rely on them exclusively
Direct outreach to business owners is harder but often yields better deals with less competition
A 2–5% response rate on cold outreach is normal — volume and consistency matter more than any single message
Your personal network and professional intermediaries (accountants, attorneys, bankers) are underrated sourcing channels
37% of traditional searchers never close a deal — go in with enough runway and realistic expectations
New to ETA? Start Here
If you landed on this post before reading the foundational content, start with What Is Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition? for a full overview of the ETA model. Then read Self-Funded Search vs. Traditional Search Fund to understand how the search phase gets funded before you dive into sourcing strategy.
Have a Topic You’d Like Covered?
Deal sourcing is just one piece of the search process. If there’s a specific topic that you’d like covered in a future post, let us know here. It directly shapes what gets written next.