About
The Problem With Repeated Advice
Advice for buying a small business lives in scattered pieces: forum threads, aging blog posts, courses, and listicles that quote each other. A lot of what gets repeated does not hold up when you check it against primary sources. Prices in particular are often out of date, or were never right to begin with.
So this site runs on one rule: claims come from primary sources, and the source is named on the page so you can check it yourself. Pricing comes from a vendor's own pages, not from roundups. Reputation notes cite where real users said what they said. Every resource lists cons, because everything has them. When a figure turns out to be wrong, the entry gets corrected rather than quietly left alone.
How a Recommendation Earns Its Place
- Status and pricing verified against the resource's own live pages, never against third-party writeups.
- Recent user sentiment gathered from the communities where searchers compare notes.
- Every entry re-checked on a schedule, with a freshness cutoff past which it does not stay published.
- Reader reports and suggestions feed the same verification queue as our own sweeps.
Where the Numbers Come From
The figures the site computes for itself come from federal data that anyone can check: the SBA's loan-level 7(a) file for what acquisition lending actually did, Census County Business Patterns for how many businesses of a given size exist and where, Census business formation and the Annual Business Survey for who owns them, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics for wages and employment by trade. Rates come from the Federal Reserve series, not from a lender's marketing page.
Where a page quotes someone else's number instead, it says whose and links to it. A figure without a source on this site is a bug worth reporting.
Questions and Corrections
A correction to a listing or a figure is the most useful thing you can send, and it goes into the same queue our own sweeps do. How to reach us.