# HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business (Ruback & Yudkoff)

The HBS guide to buying and running a company.

The Harvard Business School guide to buying and running a small company, written by the professors behind HBS's entrepreneurship-through-acquisition course: a step-by-step path through deciding, searching, valuing, financing, negotiating, and transitioning, in checklist-friendly form.

- Category: Books
- Pricing model: One-Time
- Where it fits: Learn & Choose Your Path, Source & Screen Deals
- Website: https://store.hbr.org/product/hbr-guide-to-buying-a-small-business/10090

## At a Glance

Read it with Buy Then Build as the standard on-ramp pairing; it teaches judgment rather than current rules, so its age costs less than you'd think.

## What It Costs

Paperback $21.95 from the publisher (store.hbr.org), 320 pages, published February 2017, with quantity discounts from 20% at ten copies to 55% above twenty-five hundred. The same authors' two digital articles sell beside it at $11.95 each.

## Best For

The rigor-first reader who wants the academic-practitioner version of the on-ramp, and anyone drawn to smaller, enduringly profitable businesses rather than growth stories

## Pros and Cons

- Pro: Written by the HBS professors (Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff) whose course shaped modern ETA teaching
- Pro: Unusually concrete for an introduction: [valuation](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/valuation) math, financing structures, and a realistic search calendar
- Pro: Short, structured, and checklist-driven, so it holds up as a mid-search reference
- Con: Published in 2017, so nothing on post-2023 SBA rule changes, current multiples, or today's marketplaces and tools
- Con: Leans toward the funded-search worldview; self-funded SBA mechanics get lighter treatment than in newer material

## What Searchers Say

A fixture on ETA reading lists alongside Buy Then Build, and the book [searchers](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/searcher) cite for the enduringly-profitable-business framing. Recommendations remain steady year after year; the recurring caveat is content age, not quality.

## Compared With

- Which acquisition book should you read first? (https://searchspheresource.com/resources/compare/buy-then-build-vs-hbr-guide.md)

## Sources

- https://store.hbr.org/product/hbr-guide-to-buying-a-small-business/10090
- https://www.amazon.com/HBR-Guide-Buying-Small-Business/dp/1633692507

Also on this site: https://searchspheresource.com/resources/category/book.md
Source: https://searchspheresource.com/resources/hbr-guide-buying-small-business
Last checked: 2026-09-07

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