Ryan Chenoweth

@ryanmchenoweth And that is not what I am saying

In many markets there are 10x the businesses for sale on Crexi and LoopNet compared to BizBuySell. Few understand this.

@twallyweb Fractional CFO for any small business is undersold. I didn’t hire a full-time CFO for my shop, i hired a fractional one who shows up twice a month, reviews my P&L, flags what I’m too close to see, and costs me a fraction of a full-time salary

An interesting service business would be a fractional CFO specifically for small real estate private equity companies. • quarterly reporting • K-1 administration • waterfall calculations • budgeting and underwriting • probably other stuff too Could get a couple of clients paying $5-$10k per month.

@robertoblake And in 20 years the iPad kids will be posting about how they were the last generation that learned to code by hand before AI did everything

Kids born in the 80s and 90s are the last generation with any real survival instincts and self regulation. From age 6 we spent our Saturdays being free range after 11am… you left the house for parts unknown… No cellphone, no tracking, no checking. Your parents knew you survived if you were back home when the street lights came on. We climbed trees… that falling out of would probably kill us… played in ponds and water holes that probably were more slime than water… We would eat anything we dropped under a 3-5 second rule without worrying about germs… Literally beat the hell out of each other with sticks in epic duels with our full strength behind every swing… Rode down “deadman’s hill” on our bikes, sometimes on our friend’s bikes standing on the back pegs or sitting on the handle bars… We approached random strangers to sell candy or do yard work… just stopped up and knocked on the doors.. Falling asleep under a random tree in the neighborhood wasn’t abnormal. Neither was literally jumping from a high place or seeing if you could clear a whole flight of stairs… or slide down a column or pole like super Mario… We were raised to be absolute savages…

“Mediocre people refer mediocre people.” My parts supplier is a guy named Tony who wears the same polo shirt every Tuesday, drives a 2009 Silverado, and has never once used the word “optimize” in a sentence. By these standards, Tony is mediocre. Tony also referred me to my insurance broker who saved me $11K annually, my SBA lender who closed my loan faster than any “premium” bank I’d contacted, and a used equipment dealer who sold me a lift at 40% below market because he owed Tony a favor. Tony’s network has made me more money than every impressive person I’ve ever met at a networking event combined. The networking event people had great handshakes and custom business cards and LinkedIn bios that said things like “serial entrepreneur and thought leader.” None of them have ever saved me a dollar. Tony saved me $11K with a phone call he made while eating a gas station sandwich. The sandwich was involved. He put it down, made the call, picked it back up, and said “you’re good.” That’s Tony’s whole process. Put down sandwich. Solve problem. Resume sandwich. Be very careful who you call mediocre. That person might be the Tony you desperately need but would never follow on this app because his profile picture is a fish he caught in 2016

Mediocore people will refer you to other mediocre people. Be very careful who you invest your time with.

@SBA_Matthias Now you need 2% nonrefundable deposits within five business days just to be even allowed to look at the books? That’s not due diligence, just that’s a cover charge for a club where the bouncer is a broker and the DJ is playing your credit score on repeat

The Honest Truth About Buying a Business with SBA Financing in 2026 I want to share what I’m actually seeing on the ground right now because I think a lot of people need to hear this. We broker SBA loans for acquisition entrepreneurs at Pioneer Capital Advisory. We’re in the trenches on these deals every single day. And candidly, the market has shifted in ways that would have been hard to imagine even 18 months ago. Let me give you a real example. One of our buyers recently submitted an LOI on an electrical services company at $4.6 million. That was already $300,000 above the asking price. His offer came back as the lowest out of 11 total offers. The top six bidders were in the $5.3 to $5.7 million range. His exact words to me were “it’s wild out there.” He’s right. That’s not an outlier. That’s the new normal. Here’s what I’m seeing from a deal structure standpoint across our active pipeline: Multiples have pushed higher than most buyers expect going in. We had a home health deal come across at 5.0x SDE and the lender actually called that valuation “defensible.” A year ago most lenders would have pushed back hard on anything above 4x in that space. The DealStats median EBITDA multiple for comparable industries is sitting at 4.62x right now. Quality businesses with clean books and recurring revenue are trading well above that. The competitive LOI process has become the standard, not the exception. Brokers are collecting offers and presenting all of them to the seller simultaneously. We’ve had buyers lose deals to strategic and industry acquirers who already have relationships with the seller. If you’re a first time buyer going up against someone who already owns three locations in the same vertical, you need to understand what you’re walking into. Earnest money is a whole different conversation now. We’re seeing sell side brokers require 1% to 2% deposits just to enter exclusive due diligence. One deal required the deposit within five business days of LOI execution. Another required a 2% escrow deposit before the seller would even grant exclusivity. Some brokers are running a “first to go hard wins” process where the buyer who converts their refundable deposit to nonrefundable first gets the deal. That’s a meaningful amount of capital at risk before you’ve even completed diligence. The capital stacks on these transactions are getting more creative out of necessity. I’m seeing deals structured with 80% SBA financing, 10% seller equity rollover, 5% buyer cash equity, and 5% forgivable seller notes tied to performance metrics like customer retention. Buyers who show up with a clean, thoughtful structure and a lender who already understands the business are winning. Buyers who go direct to nine different banks and burn through relationships are not. From a volume standpoint, our team ran 51 meetings last week alone. We have 4 deals under LOI and 34 in the pre LOI pipeline right now. The deal flow is there. The demand is there. But the margin for error on execution is razor thin. So what does all of this mean if you’re trying to buy a business with SBA financing in 2026? It means you need to move fast, structure smart, and have your lending relationship locked in before you submit that LOI. It means you should expect competition on anything worth buying. It means earnest money is real and it’s going to be part of the conversation earlier than you think. And it means that the days of getting a quality business at 3x with minimal money down are, for the most part, behind us. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone. Acquisitions are still one of the best paths to business ownership and wealth creation. But I think the community deserves an honest picture of what the landscape actually looks like right now. If you’re in the market, go in with your eyes open.

The Business Buyer Maturity Scale: Level 1: "I want to be my own boss" (you'll be everyone's boss and hate it) Level 2: "I want cash flow" (you'll learn cash flow is a verb, not a noun) Level 3: "I want an asset that appreciates" (now you're thinking like an investor) Level 4: "I want infrastructure I can compound on" (welcome to the real game) Most people buy at Level 1. Winners wait until (at least) Level 3

@recap_david Agent

I built a Reddit marketing agent that gets your business mentioned by ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Not a spam bot. Not the kind that gets banned by mods. An agent that drafts genuinely valuable answers grounded in your company's actual content and slips in a brand mention only when it actually helps. Google is paying Reddit $60M a year just for their data!!! If your business isn't showing up in that data, your competitors are, and ChatGPT is recommending them instead of you. Here's how the system works: → A Claude routine pulls the target subreddit's JSON endpoint every hour for new posts → A Phase 1 checklist filters every post — is it answerable from our wiki, factual, on-brand, mod-safe? → The answer engine queries an LLM Wiki built from our blog, guides, and help center (Firecrawl ingested every page into a raw → wiki → index structure) → Claude drafts a casual, value-first answer that grounds every claim in our content → Every draft lands in Slack for human-in-the-loop review before it posts — no fire-and-forget, no bans I built this in a week for CoinLedger, the crypto tax software I've been running for 8 years. 10% of our new signups already say they found us through ChatGPT. This system is how we push that number a lot higher. If you want the exact Claude skill I built: Like & Comment "AGENT" (must be following so I can dm you) I'll send it over for free.

@borjafat Seo

Claude Opus 4.7 or GPT-5.5 can run your ENTIRE SEO Tired of chasing backlinks? Solved. Tired of AI slop articles? Solved. Tired of ranking for keywords that don't convert? Solved You just install a SKILL and you're ready to roll. Can run automated daily tasks on a schedule Comment "SEO" and I'll send it!

Freedom isn't the absence of obligation. It's choosing which obligations define you. I'm obligated to my employees, my customers, my family, and whatever I'm building. Those obligations aren't chains. They're architecture. Remove them all and you don't get freedom. You get drift. The question isn't "how do I escape obligations?" It's "which obligations am I proud to carry?"

Had a conversation with a wedding planner this week who said something that stopped me: "I don't need a platform to verify vendors. I need a platform that makes BAD vendors stop getting hired." Subtle difference. Huge product implication. Verification is passive. Accountability is active. Rethinking some core assumptions.

@AlfieJCarter Marketing

If you don't have my "Claude Design and Claude Skills Marketing Playbook" yet... The one I built to run every repeated marketing task from one brief with skill files across brand extraction, campaign planning, social content, carousel design, animated video, multi-skill orchestration, Notion library sync, and Kanban task board setup... Just comment "MARKETING" and I'll DM it to you for free (must follow)

@dealflow_guy ETA students showing up to their first seller meeting with a DCF model and a confident handshake is the acquisition equivalent of bringing a PowerPoint to a bar fight

Have a buddy who runs a fund investing into SMB/IS deals. Mostly SBA stuff. Also teaches a class on ETA at UT. His students come to us occasionally, and frankly - they are woefully underprepared for the search. The spreadsheet won’t save you. Patience & grit might though.

The things that made me successful in my 20s nearly destroyed me in my 30s. Relentless work ethic becomes inability to rest. Competitiveness becomes inability to collaborate. Self-reliance becomes inability to ask for help. Your strengths don't expire. But their utility does. Audit your virtues as ruthlessly as your vices.

@patrickdichter Agreed that the fundamentals haven’t changed, the free margin for lazy ownership just disappeared

A lot of chatter on here about how much harder it is to buy a business these days vs 5 years ago. I generally agree, but one thing I love about entrepreneurship through acquisition that’s constant - most your ROI is achieved through hard work, operations and working with people.

Had a customer yell at my service advisor for 10 minutes about a $47 charge. My advisor handled it perfectly. Stayed calm. Explained the work. Didn't cave. The customer paid and left. Then my SA went to the back because he clearly needed a minute to decompress/blow off steam.. Ownership lesson: your team absorbs damage you never see. Check on them. Not their output. Them.

@CBarrett_CPA You're not back to zero. You're worse."- that line should be printed on every LOI in America

I had a client who spent over a year trying to buy a business: - quit his job - burned ~$100K in deal costs - wife kept working while he searched He eventually found a deal he was excited about... and it fell apart. We started working together on his second, and you could feel it almost immediately: This one had to work. ... that was his mindset, at least. I think he was beginning to feel the pressure, and felt like he couldn't afford another "failure" (i.e. another deal falling through). And then when we got into diligence, things started breaking. Earnings were inflated. The revenue didn't really make sense. And some operational issues didn't add up. ... but I still got the sense he wanted to move forward, so I told him straight-up: “You’re still fine right now. You’ve got a good life. You can go get another job. But if you buy this and it goes bad, you're not back to zero. You're worse." We delivered the QofE and as far as I know, he passed on the deal. If you're a first-time buyer, it's easy to get caught up in the pressure of the search... Especially if you've spent months, or years, looking for the right deal. But when it really comes down to it: The biggest risk isn't passing on the right deal... It's moving forward with the wrong one. Sometimes winning is walking away.

@Thedrivenman Fitness, finance, and family. The holy trinity of guys who describe themselves as "high-value males" in their Instagram bio while their wife quietly Googles "is it normal for your husband to track his macros at Thanksgiving dinner"

Be a man who is obsessed with fitness, finance, and family. Anything else is just a distraction.

@TheWealthPrince Money doesn't corrupt values, it reveals them

When you tie your values to money you lose all credibility. Having respectable morals is VERY important.

@mermaidsluvwine I'm building a verification platform for wedding vendors and I can tell you from the couples who choose a taco bar over a plated dinner save on average and their guests are twice as happy

Me: when the wedding reception has a taco bar.