There is no exchange for private companies. There is instead a scattered machinery of associations, local chapters, listing platforms, credentials and peer rooms, obvious to anyone inside the deal world and invisible to almost every owner outside it. This is that machinery, named.
The Institute takes no payment from anyone on this page and never will, which is the only reason it is worth reading. Nothing here is a recommendation of a particular organization, and no organization can buy its way on. What this map does is answer the question an owner cannot answer alone: given what I am trying to do, where do the people who do this professionally actually gather, list, register and qualify? Use it to find candidates and communities, then bring the questions from the Deal Team Directory to whoever you meet.
Grouped by what each thing is for. Filter to narrow, or read the whole map to understand how the private market is organized.
The membership organizations the deal professions actually belong to. Each publishes a searchable member directory, which is the honest way to build a candidate list: you are reading a body that admitted them, not a page that sold them a slot.
How to use it. Start with the body whose members do the job you need, use its directory to assemble three or four candidates in your region and size range, then put the Deal Team Directory questions to each. Membership is a starting filter, not a quality guarantee: most of these bodies admit on application and fees rather than on examination.
Middle market M&A professionals, stated as more than 1,100 members across 25 countries. Public member directory and the CM&AA designation.
The largest middle market deal community, stated as more than 14,000 members. Its value to an owner is local: the chapters listed below are where dealmakers in your city meet monthly.
A second national body for business brokers, smaller and older than the IBBA, listed in the industry’s own association directories.
The body for business brokers handling smaller owner-operated companies. Public broker directory and the CBI designation.
Lower middle market M&A advisors, sister organization to the IBBA. Directory sortable by specialty, location and designation. Awards the M&AMI.
Exit planning across advisory, M&A, legal, accounting and coaching, stated as more than 11,000 CEPAs. Public find-a-CEPA directory.
Employee stock ownership plans: member companies and the service providers who build and administer them.
Research and education on employee ownership, and the most neutral place to learn whether an ESOP is plausible for your company before you talk to anyone selling one.
Awards the Accredited in Business Valuation credential and sets much of the standards backdrop for the accounting work in a deal.
Valuation and financial forensics credentialing body. Awards the CVA and publishes a member directory.
Multidisciplinary appraisal body whose business valuation designation is one of the older and more demanding ones.
Restructuring and turnaround professionals. Relevant when a target is distressed, or when your own company is the one under strain.
Accountants and advisors working in insolvency and restructuring, including distressed acquisitions.
What the letters after an advisor’s name actually mean. Not one of these guarantees competence, and none is a substitute for the reference calls, but each tells you what body admitted them and to what standard, and an advisor who holds none of them should be able to say why.
How to use it. Use these to read a candidate’s biography with more precision, and to ask the sharper question. The useful follow-up is never "do you hold X" but "what did earning it require, and what does it not cover".
Awarded by AM&AA. Middle market transaction practice across the deal cycle.
Awarded by the IBBA. The main designation among business brokers handling smaller companies.
Awarded by M&A Source, and requires completed transactions rather than coursework alone.
Awarded by EPI. Held across several professions, so it tells you the holder studied exit planning, not what their day job is.
Awarded by the AICPA to CPAs. Valuation work intended to withstand scrutiny.
Awarded by NACVA. Widely held among valuation practitioners.
Awarded by the American Society of Appraisers, with a business valuation discipline.
The base license for the accounting work. Necessary for a quality of earnings provider and nowhere near sufficient on its own.
Investment analysis and valuation. More common on the capital side than among lower middle market advisors.
The single most useful thing on this map for an owner who knows nobody. Every chapter below runs regular events in its own city or country, and the people in the room are the bankers, lenders, lawyers, diligence providers and private equity professionals who do middle market deals in your region. You can walk in without a transaction.
How to use it. Find the chapter nearest you and attend twice before you need anything. Going while you are not in a process is the entire trick: you meet people as an owner rather than as a mandate, you learn what the local market actually looks like, and when you do need a banker you are choosing from people you have watched rather than from a referral you cannot evaluate. Read from ACG’s own chapters page in August 2026, and chapters do open and close.
Where private companies are visibly for sale, and where the deals that reach the open market are found. Understand what this channel is: the businesses here are the ones being marketed, which makes them accessible and correspondingly competitive. The good ones move fast and the rest sit.
How to use it. Use these to learn what your sector is actually asking, which is free market education even if you never inquire. Treat every listing price and financial summary as marketing rather than diligence. And if you are a seller, the honest question a broker will not raise is whether your company has outgrown the channel.
A network connecting lower middle market companies with buyers and advisors, and a publisher of useful league tables and market data.
The largest listing marketplace for smaller businesses in the United States, and its quarterly insight reports are a free read on small business transaction activity.
A long-running listing marketplace for small businesses, sister site to BizBuySell.
A marketplace listing businesses, commercial property and investment opportunities.
One of the larger business brokerage franchise networks, with offices across many markets.
A business brokerage franchise network operating across the United States and internationally.
A long-established business brokerage franchise network.
A trade publisher whose public industry directory of broker associations and networks is the closest thing the profession has to a map of itself. It is where the regional list below came from.
A business brokerage franchise network handling small and lower middle market sales.
Rooms of other owners. The founding brief names these as a genuine sourcing channel and they are, but the deeper value is that they are the only place an owner can discuss a possible sale or acquisition candidly with people who have done it and who are not paid on the outcome.
How to use it. If you belong to one already, raise your acquisition thesis or your exit thinking with your forum before you raise it with any advisor. If you belong to none, this is the cheapest useful thing on this page. Proprietary opportunities surface in these rooms constantly, because the person selling quietly tells peers long before they tell a broker.
A global peer network for founders and owners, organized into small confidential forums. Named in the founding brief as a sourcing channel.
A global network of chief executives with forum groups and substantial peer education. Also named in the founding brief.
Facilitated peer advisory groups for chief executives and owners, with a chair who runs the group.
Peer advisory boards for owners of smaller companies, which reach further down in size than most of the alternatives.
The free, authoritative sources almost no owner thinks to check. Everything here is published by a regulator or an agency, which means it is verifiable, it is not marketing, and it costs nothing.
How to use it. Check any registered person or firm before you sign anything. Ten minutes in a public registry has saved owners from advisors with histories they did not volunteer, and finding nothing is itself worth knowing.
Free background on brokers and brokerage firms registered in the United States, including registration history and disclosed events. Where any adviser handling securities should appear.
The public record for registered investment advisers and their representatives, including Form ADV filings.
Program rules and published lender data for SBA lending, which finances a large share of smaller acquisitions. Verify current terms here rather than from any lender’s summary, including this one.
Finds the SBA district office, development center and counseling resources nearest you. Free, and almost no owner knows it exists.
The national network of Small Business Development Centers, which provide no-cost advising to owners. Well below the size range most advisers serve, and genuinely useful there.
Free mentoring from experienced business people, funded in partnership with the SBA. Not deal specialists, but a sounding board that costs nothing and sells nothing.
Short, intensive programs in mergers and acquisitions taught by the business schools. A week will not make you a practitioner, and the material is usually pitched at corporate acquirers rather than at founder-owned companies, so you will be translating. What you are really buying is frameworks taught by people who research them, a simulated deal you can get wrong at no cost, and a room of peers facing the same decisions.
How to use it. Ask who else is in the room before you ask about the curriculum, because the peer conversations are frequently worth more than the syllabus. Ask whether there is a deal simulation and treat its absence as a real gap. Program names, dates and formats change every term, so treat the link as the school and confirm the current offering there.
An interdisciplinary program on executing mergers, acquisitions and corporate restructuring. Also offered in a live online format.
The full Booth program catalog, including finance and strategy offerings adjacent to the M&A program.
Runs M&A and corporate development programming aimed at leaders treating acquisition as a repeatable growth engine rather than a one-off transaction.
Home of Merger Week, which has run for more than forty years and covers search, valuation, negotiation and integration end to end.
Runs M&A programming covering synergy capture, diligence, deal documentation and transaction structuring.
Case-method executive programs across strategy, finance and general management.
Executive programs from the school where the search fund model originated.
Executive programs with a strong analytical and technology-transition emphasis.
European executive programs including corporate finance and transaction content.
International executive programs including M&A and corporate strategy.
Executive programs with substantial mid-market and family business content.
Executive programs across finance, strategy and leadership.
Case-method executive programs with a strong general management core.
A distinct and well-documented route into ownership: buying a company in order to run it, rather than adding one to a company you already own. It has its own literature, funding conventions, community and conferences, largely built out of a handful of universities. Relevant to an owner in two ways, as a path for a son or daughter who wants to own something, and as a description of a buyer type who may one day approach you.
How to use it. Read the Stanford primer in the Library first, because it is free and it will tell you within an hour whether this world is yours. If it is, these are the communities where the model is actually taught and practiced.
Where the search fund model originated in the 1980s, and the source of the periodic study that is the definitive data on how these funds perform.
Booth’s entrepreneurship center, host of one of the largest entrepreneurship through acquisition conferences.
Penn’s entrepreneurship through acquisition resources and community.
The main online community for searchers, funders and operators in this model, and a candid window into what these buyers are actually looking for.
Below the national bodies sits a layer of state and regional associations, each with its own membership, events and in many cases a listing service. For an owner of a smaller company these are frequently more useful than the national organizations, because the members actually work in your market and know what comparable businesses in your state have sold for.
How to use it. Find the one covering your state, look at its member list, and note that several run their own multiple listing services, which is where smaller local businesses appear before they reach the national marketplaces. Every entry below returned a live site in August 2026; three others named in the industry directory did not, which is the ordinary attrition in this layer.
Runs its own listing service for Florida businesses.
Covers the Chicago and wider Midwest market.
The subscription tools professional buyers use to build target lists, and the reason a buy-side adviser can produce a list you cannot. Most are priced for firms rather than for one owner doing one deal, which is itself worth knowing: when an adviser quotes you a retainer, part of what you are renting is access to these.
How to use it. Do not buy one for a single acquisition. Do ask any buy-side adviser which of these they actually pay for, because the answer separates a firm with real search infrastructure from one that will run the same public searches you could run yourself.
A search engine for private companies, built for finding targets that are not for sale and do not appear in listing marketplaces.
Private company data assembled substantially from conference lists and other public sources, used for building sector maps.
Private market data covering transactions, valuations, investors and advisers, including league tables by adviser.
Financial and transaction data widely used by bankers and diligence providers.
Company and funding data, strongest on technology and venture-backed companies, with a free tier.
Business credit and company identity data, including the DUNS numbering used across supplier and credit checks.
Listed for orientation only. The Institute accepts no payment from any organization named here, takes no fee tied to any transaction, and does not place or refer anyone for compensation. Inclusion is not endorsement and exclusion is not judgment. Details were verified in August 2026 and organizations change; confirm anything that matters before relying on it.