Ryan Ray 🦏

Programmatic SEO is the most oversold strategy in local SEO right now. In 2026 it is doing more harm than good for small businesses and almost nobody is willing to say that because there's too much money being made selling it. Let me break the whole thing down.

I had 4 friends reach out today for cars. 3 new 1 repeat. In one day. It’s been like this for weeks now. The pipeline is getting juiced. Loving it. May is off to a crazy start.

@SBA_Matthias Yeah they are def different. I looked at them a few years ago to send them some leads and remember it was a different game. Never got too deep but hearing about that guy has me wondering lol

@ryanraysr USDA loans are a bear The funding is through state level offices and the pots of funding with one to the next aren’t consistent

Ran into a banker that does USDA loans. He said one of there referral sources makes $550,000 from sending them deals. Where did I go wrong in life?

@solarbizguy Magnolia Bank

@ryanraysr What bank?

@ryanraysr I'll rephrase what you said. Most people who WANT to sell don't PLAN to sell... PSA for those who want to work till they die. Do some estate planning to make it easy on your loved ones who survive you. Your funeral can then be a celebration of life not a respite from paperwork

@TBitTwo You and me both

@ryanraysr I need to market for USDA loans.

Can anyone make an introduction to Mike Meldman, founder of Discovery Land Company? I'd love to have him on the podcast.

@stephenolmon haha! no doubt!

A business is worth what someone will pay for it *Not what the owner thinks / feels / believes it’s worth And a bajillion small deals do / will struggle to sell because of this tension Hard to call the baby ugly!

@Tawheed It’s one of those tools that I alway start to use and then stop a few weeks later.

I haven’t logged into my Notion in months. It used to be my second brain.

Some owners want to work until they die. Others want to sell their business at some point. The issue is that most of the ones who plan on selling don’t plan to sell. They wait too long to do what needs to be done to create real value in their business and it either won’t sell or not nearly enough for what they want from it.

@theron_olsen Roaring kitty saved them lol. Just wild

@ryanraysr Dumb Money

Crazy to even read this

Another @ReviewRoverCo update You can now take a CSV file of all your past customers And it will put all of those customers into a review sequence asking for a 5 star review

@SellersCounsel New phone who dis lol

Went back anon. Some losers in the DMs talking about bar complaints because of my takes on here. Obviously wouldn’t go anywhere but just not worth the headache. Deactivated for a couple days but like the community too much to leave it behind. So we are back to this for now.

Dude dropping gold hear

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.

4 years ago today, three BigLaw-trained M&A lawyers launched a firm to serve the deals BigLaw refused to touch. Just a couple short years later, @smblawgroup had dethroned every white shoe firm in America to become the #1 M&A law firm in Texas by deal count. And man, what a wild ride it has been! 4.5 years ago, @SMB_Attorney and I were on the phone chatting about how much his DM's had blown up (while still anon) with active deals in need of a good M&A lawyer. Finding a lawyer wasn't hard. But a good one? Those ones were $2,000+ an hour, populated expensive downtown offices, and staffed transactions with a couple basketball teams of lawyers. And candidly, those guys just weren't interested in $3.5 million main street deals. Conversely, while Eric and I were those BigLaw guys, we wanted nothing more than to do main street deals. So throwing caution to the wind, we hatched a plan to launch a main street focused M&A boutique. Entrepreneurs signing a personal guaranty for the most important transaction of their lives deserved the best. When we met @Sam_Rosati a few months later, I think his first reaction was something along the lines of "I've been waiting years for someone to build a firm like this." And just like that...the idea was instantly validated with one of the most trustworthy voices in ETA. What we didn't know at the time was how how much this would change our lives. Since that date 4 years ago we have: ▪️Added appx. 20 team members ▪️Closed over 375 deals with over $1.75B in enterprise value! ▪️Been published and recognized in Forbes, Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, and more ▪️Won various awards, including for law firm innovation and @SMB_Attorney as managing partner of the year in Florida ▪️Dethroned every white shoe law firm in America to become the #1 M&A law firm in Texas by deal count I'm incredibly grateful to have partners like @SMB_Attorney and @Sam_Rosati, along with an incredible team of lawyers and staff that have bought into the vision to become the #1 lower-middle market law firm in America. We're well on our way and I can't wait to see what the next 4 years bring! 🚀🚀🔥🔥

Another great conference in Houston held by our friends over at Equity Launchpad. These guys do a great job, and I’m proud to support them every year. It was great meeting some new faces and deepening relationships with familiar ones who support the M&A ecosystem. See y’all next year! #deals #transactions #qoe #Entrepreneur

@Ryan___Doyle Talk to @mattressguy_

what's your favorite mattress you've ever bought on Amazon?