An independent institution for owners of private companies considering growth through acquisition, and for owners considering a sale.

Acquisition guidance for first-time buyers. founder-owned companies. roll-up strategies. add-on acquisitions. management buyouts. retiring competitors. owners considering a sale. family businesses.

Acquiring another business can accelerate a decade of growth, or jeopardize everything you have built.

Talk to the Acquisition Concierge
Free, private, and grounded in the 66 works of the Library

This is the best place to start. Tell it where you are, in your own words, and it will orient you properly. It is not a salesperson, there is nothing to sign up for, and it will happily tell you that it is too early to be doing this at all.

Where are you?
66works in the Library
6journey stages
18subject areas
the journey

The journey, in six stages.

Every page on this site belongs to one of these. Start wherever you are; the Concierge will tell you if you have skipped one.

stage one

Acquisition Strategy & Readiness

before you look at a single company
stage two

Sourcing & Target Identification

finding companies worth talking to
stage three

Valuation & Due Diligence

what is it worth, and what is actually there
stage four

Deal Structure & Financing

how the deal is built and paid for
stage five

Integration & Value Creation

where the value is actually created or lost
the other side

Preparing to Sell

for owners considering a sale
How it works

An AI-first Institute

Stop trusting generic AI models for expensive answers.

Researchers That Never Sleep

Specialist research agents read the primary sources themselves, the regulations and the enforcement record, not summaries of them.

Get a Preliminary Read Now

Describe the deal. The Acquisition Concierge answers from the Institute’s own research, not from the open web.

Talk to an Expert

Some questions need a person who has closed one, not an article. Tell the Institute what you are facing.

begin here

Where are you in the journey?

Start a private conversation with the Acquisition Concierge. It is built to orient rather than to sell, including telling you when the honest answer is that it is too early, or that what you need is a program rather than an adviser. Choose a stage to begin.

Acquisition ConciergeOrientation, not a substitute for your own advisers
Tell me where you are and I'll orient you, whether you are only beginning to explore acquisitions, evaluating a specific company, or considering selling your own. I won't give you a valuation, and I won't give legal or tax advice.
Private Acquisition Advisory

When information is not the problem

Some owners reach a point where another article or directory will not resolve the difficulty. The problem is integrating strategy, sourcing, adviser selection, financing and execution into one coherent process. The Institute occasionally serves as a private acquisition advisor to owners facing exactly that, as their independent adviser, alongside rather than instead of the transactional professionals.

the acquisition library · curated and read by the institute

The canon, curated.

The sixty-six works on private-company acquisition worth an owner’s time, each with the Institute’s candid reading: what it argues, what to do with it, and where the authorities disagree.

66 works
Books, scholarship, benchmarks, podcasts and lectures, every fact verified before entry.
34 papers & studies
Scholarly anchors with citation records, from the journals to the Chicago tradition.
23 disagreements
Where serious authorities conflict, the shelf records it rather than pretending.
browse the library
writing from the Institute

Opinionated, and willing to be unwelcome.

Most companies should not acquire merely because organic growth has become difficult. A proprietary deal is not a good deal; it is a deal without an auction. The right time to design integration is before the letter of intent.

Explore the stages
A wall calendar and a closed manila folder on a workshop office desk beside a coffee cup, late afternoon light across the pages
Preparing to Sell
How long does it take to sell a small business?
Most published timelines for selling a small company come from surveys of the brokers who sold them, not from an independent measurement, and the honest answer is a range rather than a number. For the second quarter of 2026, the most recent quarter the International Business Brokers Association and M&A Source have published, those advisors reported Main Street deals averaging six to ten months from engagement to close and lower middle market deals averaging eleven to twelve.
September 15, 2026
 A thick stack of bank statements and a spiral-bound financial report lying open on a wooden table beside a calculator, photographed from directly above in daylight
Valuation & Due Diligence
What does a quality of earnings report actually test?
A quality of earnings review asks whether reported profit is recurring, transferable and actually collected in cash, which is a different question from the one an audit answers. It sits under a different body of professional standards, carries no opinion and no assurance, and its scope is fixed by the engagement letter rather than by any rule, with one exception that arrives on 1 October 2026 for buyers borrowing under the SBA 7(a) program.
September 15, 2026
 An empty office chair pushed back from a desk holding a wall of labeled ring binders and a switched-on monitor, early morning
Integration & Value Creation
What breaks in the first hundred days after an acquisition?
The failures owners are warned about are usually described with a statistic that has no study behind it, while the things that actually break in the opening weeks are dull, specific and largely knowable in advance: the payroll and tax reporting cutover, the departure of people whose knowledge was never written down, a seller whose transition is shorter than the business needs, and consents that were assumed to travel with the deal and did not.
September 15, 2026
 A single sheet of typed criteria held down by a brass paperweight on a plain wooden desk, beside a closed folder and a fountain pen, lit from a window on the left
Acquisition Strategy & Readiness
What is an acquisition thesis, and why do buyers without one overpay?
An acquisition thesis is a written specification of what a buyer will and will not buy, and the part that does the most work is the list of characteristics that rule a company out regardless of price. Buyers without one evaluate each company on that company’s own terms, which is the condition under which price discipline quietly disappears.
September 15, 2026
 A closing table set with a neat stack of loan documents, a calculator, and a pen, photographed from directly overhead with no people visible.
Deal Structure & Financing
What does an SBA 7(a) loan require from a buyer?
An SBA 7(a) loan financing the purchase of a company comes with four specific requirements on the buyer's side, an equity injection, a rule for how much of it a seller note can cover, a personal guaranty, and an independent valuation of the business. An application made today runs under SOP 50 10 8; two of the four requirements change for loans that receive an SBA loan number on or after October 1, 2026, when SOP 50 10 8.1 takes effect.
September 15, 2026
 A conference room table holding two mirrored stacks of transaction documents with a single pen resting between them, photographed from directly overhead.
Sourcing & Target Identification
Does a business broker work for the buyer or the seller?
A business broker's title tells a buyer almost nothing about who the broker actually owes a duty to, who pays the fee, or whether the person needs any license at all: three questions with three different answers, and all three vary by state in ways that surprise most first-time buyers.
September 15, 2026
a brief introduction

A brief introduction from the Executive Director

Ninety seconds on why the Institute exists, how it is paid, and what the free concierge will tell you before you hire anyone.

Watch the full interview and read the transcript →
common questions

What owners ask before they trust a site like this.

These come before the stages of the journey do. If the answers are unsatisfying, nothing further down the page will help.

What does the Institute actually do?
It is an educational institution for owners of private companies who are considering growth through acquisition, or an eventual sale. It explains how the journey actually works, from strategy, sourcing, valuation, diligence, structure and financing through integration and preparation for sale, in plain language written for owners rather than for deal professionals, and it will help you think through where you are.
Are you a business broker or an M&A advisor?
No. The Institute does not market companies for sale, does not represent buyers or sellers in a transaction, does not negotiate or effect transactions, and does not hold or handle funds or securities. It is a body of knowledge and an advisory resource. When a transaction reaches the point of needing brokerage, legal, accounting or financing services, those are separate engagements with separate professionals, and the Institute will say so.
How is the Institute paid?
The orientation is free and stays free. Where an owner wants sustained help, whether working through a thesis, pressure-testing a specific opportunity, assembling and managing a deal team, or preparing a company for an eventual sale, those are private advisory engagements billed as fixed fees, agreed in writing before any work begins.
Do you take a percentage of the deal?
No. No percentage of any transaction, no success fee, and no commission. The Institute also accepts no referral fee, revenue share or other compensation from any attorney, accountant, lender, insurer or advisor it names to you. Its fee does not change if you buy, and does not change if you walk away, which is the only arrangement under which advice to walk away is worth anything.
Is this investment advice?
No. Nothing here is investment, legal, tax or accounting advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any business or security. Acquiring a company is a decision with consequences the Institute cannot see from here, and it depends on your circumstances, your financing and your appetite for risk. What the Institute offers is an education in how the process works and what usually goes wrong.
I have never bought a company. Is this for me?
Yes. That is precisely the reader it was written for. Most material about acquisitions is written for people who do deals professionally and assumes a vocabulary and a set of instincts a first-time buyer does not have. The Institute assumes you run a real company, know your industry far better than any advisor will, and have never been through this particular process.

Before you hire the banker or sign the letter of intent.

Describe where you are. The Institute will orient you, with no process to enter and no obligation. Not ready for anything active? The Confidential Registry keeps what you are looking for quietly on file, and nothing is shared without your express permission.

speak with the Institute
Acquisition ConciergeOrientation, not a substitute for your own advisers
Tell me where you are in the journey and I'll orient you. I can help you think through whether to acquire, what to look for, how deals are structured, or what selling would involve, I won't value a company or give legal or tax advice.