What Actually Works
How to Buy a Business With No Money
Start With the Floor
SBA 7(a) financing requires an equity injection of at least 10% of the total project cost, and lenders verify where it came from. Deal costs (diligence, legal, lender fees) ride on top, and you need runway to live on. The realistic floor is covered in how much it costs to buy a business; this page is about the structures that lower it. What the program requires today, including the standby rule a seller note has to meet to count toward the injection, is on the SBA loan statistics.
What Genuinely Reduces Cash to Close
A seller note on full standby. Under current SBA rules a seller note subordinated to the bank and taking no payments for the loan's life can count toward up to 50% of the injection, a half it shares with any other standby debt and any minority investor's money. That makes the smallest genuine cash figure half of it rather than nought. The full standby entry explains the mechanics and the SBA calculator models it.
Investor equity. Raising the injection from investors trades ownership for cash: the search fund model formalizes this, and platforms in the capital tier exist for exactly this gap.
Retirement funds via ROBS. A ROBS structure deploys your own 401(k) into the purchase without early-withdrawal penalties; it is legal, IRS-recognized, heavily compliance-bound, and it concentrates your retirement into one small business. Setting one up is not free: IRA Financial lists $3,500 up front and $1,200 a year, Benetrends $4,995 and $158 a month, Guidant Financial from $5,495 and from $149 a month, and Nexus 401(k) $5,000 and $500 a quarter. Kept ten years, that is $15,500 to $25,000 in fees. The SBA calculator prices a rollover beside borrowing for one deal, and the first finding is the one to know going in: rollover money inside the required injection replaces your cash, not the loan, so it saves no interest.
Borrowing the injection yourself. A home equity line or another personal loan can count toward the equity injection, on two conditions the rules state plainly. The loan has to be made to a guarantor of the SBA loan, which in practice means you. And repayment has to come from a source other than the business's cash flow, with the salary the business pays you named as not qualifying. So it works where another income carries the payment and it fails where the business is the only place the money could come from. Price the payment into your own budget before the deal, and note what it does to your downside: the house is now behind a loan that already takes a personal guarantee.
Buying where you work. A management buyout is the nearest thing to a real low-money path: sellers finance more for a successor they trust, and you already know the business.
Equity rollover and earnouts. A seller keeping a stake (rollover) or taking part of the price contingent on results (earnout) shrinks the check at close in exchange for shared upside or future obligations. Beside an SBA loan both are the rulebook's call: a seller earnout is prohibited, and a seller who keeps a stake turns the purchase into a partial change of ownership, in which an owner who stays guarantees the loan. Which seller note terms stay open is Negotiating Seller Financing.
The Myths to Skip
One hundred percent seller financing on a good business is rare for a reason: owners with clean books and real earnings have better options. Deals that arrive with no-money-down structures attached usually price the risk in somewhere else, through an inflated price, a distressed business, or terms you will regret in a down quarter. Run any such deal through the Deal Screener before falling for the structure, and read what key-person risk and customer concentration do to a cheap-looking deal.
The Practical Path
If your capital is genuinely near zero, the highest-probability route is not a clever structure; it is time: earn and save toward the floor while building industry knowledge, or work inside a business you might one day buy. The Runway Calculator turns the target into a number, the Path Quiz maps your situation to a lane, and the 90-Day Syllabus makes the waiting productive.
The other door, when the cash gap is real rather than avoidable: somebody else puts it in. Investors lists the firms that back searchers, including the ones that fund a deal-by-deal equity gap rather than a whole search, and what an equity gap is names the thing they are filling.