In this episode I sit down with Richard Parker, founder of Diomo Corporation and author of How To Buy A Good Business At A Great Price. Richard has personally bought 14 businesses over more than 35 years, he was hired by the Dalio family to mentor one of Ray Dalio's sons on buying small businesses, and he has built one of the most widely read buyer education resources in the world.This one is a real debate. Richard is a buy-side skeptic who leans hard on seller financing, and most of you watching make your living on SBA and bank debt. So we put him in the room and let him make his case. We get into why he tells buyers to fall in love with the profit and not the product, how he actually values a business, why he says most listings are overpriced and carry hidden problems, and what separates the small group of people who close from the ones who look for years and never buy.Charles and I also walk through what has changed in the market this year, from larger SBA borrowing capacity to the shift toward cash flow underwriting, and we pressure test whether cheaper and bigger capital makes buyers better or just makes it more expensive to be wrong. The figures Richard shares are his own numbers from his own track record, so take them as his experience, not a promise about your deal.If you are trying to buy your first business or your next one, this is the honest conversation about risk, discipline and financing that I wish more people were having.Chapters0:00 Cold open1:30 Welcome and guest intro4:00 Origin story and buy vs build philosophy12:00 Why now: the boomer wave and the bigger SBA checkbook20:00 Valuation and the Diomo method30:00 The financing fault line: seller financing vs SBA40:00 Due diligence, quality of earnings and the landmines48:00 Buyer psychology: why most never close54:00 Rapid fire58:00 CloseTry it free - https://dealflow-os.comSubscribe to my newsletter - https://buybuildexitwithroyredd.subst...Follow me on Instagram - @buybuildexitFree Class - https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-...

Michael E. Gerber wrote The E-Myth Revisited forty years ago and it has sold millions of copies since. Inc. Magazine calls him the world's number one small business guru. In this episode I sit down with Michael alongside my co-host Charles Oglesby to ask the question every lender should be asking: why do most of the businesses we finance fail, and what separates a bankable business from a well-paid job with overhead?We cover the entrepreneurial seizure and why the technician who makes the pies should almost never own the pie shop. We dig into why documented systems are not just an operations idea but an underwriting standard, and how the SBA's move away from credit scores toward cash-flow fundamentals lines up with what Michael has been saying for four decades. With SBA loan limits expanding dramatically, we ask whether more capital for Main Street is a blessing or a loaded gun, and what has to change inside a business before it can responsibly carry serious debt.We also get into the acquisition wave, what a buyer actually owns when all the systems live in the seller's head, the due-diligence version of the E-Myth, whether AI finally solves the systems problem or just automates the seizure, and Michael's unfinished mission to transform small business worldwide.If you lend to, advise, buy, or run a small business, this one is required listening.Deal Flow OS: dealflow-os.comNewsletter: https://buybuildexitwithroyredd.subst...Instagram: @buybuildexitFree Class, Buy Build Exit Academy: https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-...

Half the businesses being bought right now have a problem the buyer cannot see. That is not my number. It is what my guest, Elliott Holland, says his firm finds when they open up the books on deals that are already teed up with SBA financing.Elliott is the founder of Guardian Due Diligence and the man the search community calls the King of QoE. He is a Harvard MBA and a former private equity investor who has bought companies with his own money, so he has sat on the buyer side of the table with real dollars on the line. In this episode Charles and I put him in front of the audience almost nobody else does. We do not just ask him buyer questions. We ask him underwriting questions.Here is what we get into. Why the buyer is the only person at the closing table who has never done this before, and what that experience gap costs. What a Quality of Earnings report actually is and why it is different from the tax returns and financials a lender already collects. The gap between the DSCR on the application and the DSCR in reality, now that small SBA loans underwrite on seller provided numbers. The most creative add-backs he has ever seen someone try. Who in the ecosystem is actually paid to catch a problem before closing, and who is paid to look away. And the honest profile of the person who should keep their W-2 and not buy a business at all.With SBA limits climbing and the biggest ownership transfer in Main Street history underway, this is the conversation every lender and every first-time buyer needs before they wire the money, not after.If you found this useful, subscribe and share it with your credit team.Chapters are in the timestamps below.Try Deal Flow OS freedealflow-os.comhttps://buybuildexitwithroyredd.subst...@buybuildexithttps://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-...

On this episode of Buy Build Exit, Charles and I sit down with Nimi Natan, President and CEO of Gulf Coast Small Business Lending, the national SBA arm of Gulf Coast Bank and Trust. Nimi has spent more than 30 years in finance, but his path is anything but ordinary. He started in commercial photography at Polaroid, grew up around small businesses, ran a burger operation himself, and built an SBA lending platform from scratch in Dallas before selling it to Gulf Coast in 2016.We get into the biggest rewrite of the small business lending rulebook in years. The new SOP 50 10 8 took effect June 1, 2025 and brought back stricter underwriting, a 10 percent equity injection on startups and change of ownership deals, lower collateral thresholds, higher minimum credit scores, and a major change to how seller notes count toward a buyer's equity. If you are buying or selling a business, these changes hit your deal directly.We also cover why defaults climbed, what Nimi means when he talks about the industry coming off a sugar high, and how the health of the 7(a) program actually affects real borrowers. Then we get into the story everyone in our world is talking about, the Silver Tsunami of retiring owners and the record wave of acquisition lending, plus the uncomfortable truth about how many of those businesses are actually salable.Nimi calls this his fifth rodeo across five decades of crises, and his core belief is that small business backed by the SBA comes out of every cycle stronger. This one is packed with real talk for anyone buying, selling, or funding a business right now.Some figures and rules discussed are time sensitive, so always confirm the current standard with a qualified lender or advisor before you act on a deal.dealflow-os.comhttps://buybuildexitwithroyredd.subst...IG: @buybuildexitFree Class — Buy Build Exit Academy: https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-...

Wall Street just announced a 170 billion dollar media merger, private equity is on track to do 5.3 trillion in deals this year, and the biggest buy side firms on earth just admitted they are not sure the businesses they are buying will be worth anything in five years because of AI. In this episode Charles and I go topic to topic on what is actually moving in M and A and small business right now, and what every piece of it means for the person trying to buy a two million dollar business.I break down the one question I think you have to ask before you buy anything in 2026: does AI eat this business, or does AI feed it. We get into the barbell market that is squeezing the middle, why the run it from the beach dream got called dead this year, the searcher glut that has more buyers chasing fewer quality deals, and why the first 90 days after close destroy more deals than bad financials ever will.If you are actively looking to buy a business, this is the map for where value is moving and where the knife fights are.Chapters00:00 Cold open00:30 Intro and how we are running the show today02:30 AI is eating the buy side: does AI eat your business or feed it14:30 Wall Street spent 170 billion while you fought over a 2M deal24:30 The Tulum dream is officially dead34:30 Too many buyers not enough deals: the searcher glut42:30 The first 90 days kill more deals than bad financials50:30 The pattern behind all of it: quick hits56:30 One move for the week and where to go nextLinksdealflow-os.comhttps://buybuildexitwithroyredd.subst...@buybuildexithttps://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-...

Most first business deals do not die because the business was bad. They die because nobody understood the money. On March 1st, 2026 the SBA quietly rewrote who is even allowed to get one of these loans, and most buyers have no idea it happened.In this episode Charles and I sit down with Alan Peterson, Senior SBA Business Development Officer at First Internet Bank and one of the top SBA lenders in the country. Alan has personally funded more than 300 million dollars in SBA loans across his career, including over 70 million last year alone. He lives at the exact point where most first time acquisitions fall apart, the financing.We get into the new citizenship eligibility rules, the truth about 10 percent down and the standby note structure, why good deals quietly die at the closing table, the idea of the SBA as a golden handcuff once you cross 5 million dollars, and exactly what to do this week if you have an LOI in hand. We close with a rapid fire round packed with quotable answers for first time buyers.If you have been thinking about buying a business this year, this is the financing playbook you have been missing.Timestamps are below. Drop your questions in the comments and I will answer as many as I can in the first hour.dealflow-os.comhttps://buybuildexitwithroyredd.subst...@buybuildexitBuy Build Exit Academy - https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-...

Private equity is buying law firms now using a structure most people have never heard of, the SBA just rewrote the rules on acquisition financing, and dental and vet roll ups are showing us exactly how this movie ends in every boring industry.In this episode Charles and I go topic to topic on what is actually happening in M and A and small business acquisitions right now. No listener questions today, just six hot topics in about an hour.We cover how private equity is using MSO structures to get around the rule that blocks non lawyers from owning law firms, why a Louisiana personal injury firm partnering with a PE backed investor in January 2026 might be the first domino in a massive legal industry roll up, and why law firm multiples are already moving from the historical four to six times EBITDA range toward eight to twelve times for sponsor backed platforms.Then we get into the SBA changes that went into effect March first 2026. New citizenship requirements, a six month ownership lookback, the end of the automated credit score fast track for small loans, and a collateral threshold that dropped from five hundred thousand dollars down to fifty thousand dollars. If your plan was just get an SBA loan, this episode tells you what changed underneath you.We also break down the dental and veterinary roll up landscape, why twenty one plus PE backed dental platforms now support around fifteen percent of all dentists in the country, why vet medicine is roughly five years behind that curve, and what that timeline tells you about where your own industry might be headed.Plus the bigger 2026 M and A picture, why this is being called a conviction cycle instead of a volume cycle, what four point three trillion dollars in private equity dry powder actually means for buyers at every size, and why every one of these headlines points back to the same four step playbook you can run on a business worth one and a half million dollars instead of one and a half billion.If you are serious about buying, building, or exiting a business, this is the kind of episode that changes how you read the news.Try Deal Flow OS free and let AI find motivated sellers in your target industry before anyone else gets there.Join the free class inside Buy Build Exit Academy and learn the exact framework for your first acquisition.LINKSdealflow-os.comhttps://buybuildexitwithroyredd.subst...IG: @buybuildexitFree Class: Buy Build Exit Academy — https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-...

Three of the biggest private companies on earth are hitting the public market in the same window. SpaceX just priced the largest IPO in history at around 1.77 trillion dollars. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, filed to go public at nearly a trillion. And while everyone is staring at the trillion dollar tickers, the real money in 2026 is being made buying septic companies, HVAC shops, and landscaping businesses nobody is tweeting about.In this all listener question episode, Charles and I answer the questions you keep sending in. We connect the headlines to the opportunity. The headlines are IPOs. The opportunity is acquisitions.Here is what we get into:Whether you should actually buy the SpaceX IPO or if you are buying the top. Why a 1.77 trillion dollar valuation means you are buying a story, not a business, and why cash flow is the only truth that matters.Whether Anthropic going public at almost a trillion is a smart buy or dot com 2.0. Two things can be true. Claude can be a great product and the valuation can still be ahead of itself. I build on the Anthropic API inside Deal Flow OS, so I break down the operator angle versus the investor angle.What the IPO floodgate actually means for a normal operator running a 2 million dollar landscaping company. When the top of the market is liquid, capital flows down. The exit window reopens for everyone underneath it.Whether M and A is actually back or just headlines. Private equity is sitting on roughly 4.3 trillion dollars in dry powder that has to get deployed, and deal value is climbing faster than deal volume.The silver tsunami and whether the window is closing on you. Around 12 million boomers own businesses and an estimated 10 trillion dollars in assets is changing hands. You are not late. You are early to a five to ten year transfer.Whether you are too late to roll up HVAC, plumbing, or septic now that PE is buying everything. This is my actual lane. I break down the multiple arbitrage that drives every roll up and why you compete below the big platforms, not against them.How to actually finance a roll up. SBA versus seller financing versus conventional. Why seller financing is the independent buyer superpower.Whether you should start an AI startup or buy a boring business that already prints money.Plus a headline deal hot take round and a rapid fire listener question segment to close it out.Everybody wants to own the AI company. I would rather own the company that pumps the AI company septic tank and gets paid every quarter, recession or not.Buy smart. Build relentlessly. Exit rich.If you got value from this, subscribe and share it with the one friend who keeps saying they want to buy a business but never does.LINKS Try it free - https://dealflow-os.comSubscribe to my newsletter - https://buybuildexitwithroyredd.substack.com/Follow me on Instagram - @buybuildexitFree Class - https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-academy-8709/about

In this episode of Buy Build Exit I sit down with Chris Barnard, the CEO and owner of Dedicated Logistics Partner and CGB Express, two companies doing around 20 million dollars combined across five locations and four states.Chris started out as an A and P aircraft mechanic, spent more than thirty years in logistics, and built his operation by buying up the small trucking and last mile businesses that nobody else wanted. While everybody on this app is chasing AI startups and software multiples, Chris is quietly consolidating one of the most fragmented industries in America, one acquisition at a time.If you are an operator looking to buy your first 1 million to 5 million dollar business, this is the playbook. We get into how Chris evaluates a logistics target, why route density and contract stability make or break a deal, how he thinks about customer concentration risk, and how he went from being the bottleneck in his own company to running it as a true CEO on EOS.We also cover the exact acquisition scorecard he uses, the mistakes sellers make that tank their price, how to de risk the people side of a deal before you close, and the ninety day plan for your first logistics acquisition.This one is proof that the boring, asset heavy businesses are where the real wealth gets built.dealflow-os.comhttps://buybuildexitwithroyredd.substack.com/@buybuildexithttps://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-academy-8709/about

Most companies buying AI licenses are wasting their money. Not because the tools are bad because nobody's actually using them. In this episode of Buy Build Exit, I sit down with Kamil Banc, fractional Chief AI Officer, founder of AI Adopters Club, and one of the sharpest practical AI minds in the game right now.Kamil breaks down why AI adoption fails inside mid-market companies, what he calls "boring AI" and why it actually wins, and exactly how buyers can use AI to run faster, smarter due diligence on acquisitions including what a 48-hour AI-powered diligence process looks like versus a two-week manual grind.We also get into roll-up strategy, post-acquisition integration, and a real deal where AI caught something the humans completely missed. If you're buying businesses or building a company and you want to actually get ROI from AI this one's for you.Topics covered:Why AI adoption is a culture problem, not a tech problemWhat "boring AI" means and why it outperforms frontier model chasingHow to use AI to evaluate a 1M to 5M business deal faster and smarterWhat AI-powered due diligence looks like in practiceThe biggest AI use case in roll-ups that most operators missHow to de-risk post-acquisition integration before you even closeThe 90-day build for a fully AI-powered acquisition processKamil's own AI flywheel running behind AI Adopters ClubKamil Banc is a fractional Chief AI Officer, author of The CEO's Guide to Generative AI, and founder of AI Adopters Club — a newsletter with tens of thousands of subscribers focused on practical AI workflows for operators.dealflow-os.comSubscribe to my newsletter - https://buybuildexitwithroyredd.substack.com/Instagram - @buybuildexitFree Class - https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-academy-8709/about