Buy Build Exit

Ray Drew, SBA Ray, has sat in every seat in SBA lending: bank, credit union, non-bank lender, 504 shop, and his own lender service provider, SBA Collective, which he sold into Lendesca this year. Now he's Lendesca's Chief Revenue Officer and hosts the top podcast in the SBA industry. Charles Oglesby and I sat down with him for the full conversation. Ray says only about 13 percent of eligible lende...

A 35-year-old HVAC company in Tampa. $4.3M in revenue, $620K in EBITDA, no debt, asking $2.5M. That is about 4x earnings in a trade where I see private equity paying a lot more. So either this is the cheapest HVAC company in America, or somebody is hiding something. This is the full Acquisition Room session, start to finish. First I tear the listing down line by line: why "turnkey" is th...

This is my full conversation with Mike Kruckeberg. Mike has owned businesses in five industries over 17 years, from insurance agencies to restaurants to home care to a pool company, and now he advises owners on buying and selling through NorthStar Business Advisors in Pensacola. Here is what we cover. How a GM engineer built what he says was the top selling Allstate agency in the country. The $500...

This is the full episode with Charles and me. A chip company just agreed to an all-stock deal at a $115B enterprise value, and PwC's 2026 midyear outlook projects about $4T in global deal value this year, up 13 percent. The number of deals is down 13 percent. So why does selling a small business still feel impossible? Here is what we cover. The Marvell and Lumentum deal and the AI hardware bet...

Buying a business with an SBA loan changed on October 1, 2026, and I brought in someone who has seen the lending side from the inside. Sterling Birdsong spent more than a decade in banking, produced over $50 million in SBA loans in a single year, and was at BayFirst when it exited the SBA 7(a) program in 2025. Now he runs his own shop. In this episode, Charles and I break down what SOP 50 10 8.1 m...

This week three buyers wrote checks most of us will never see, and every one of them ran the same playbook you use on a $3 million deal. Charles and I take apart Paramount closing its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, Schneider Electric agreeing to pay a 42 percent premium for industrial software company PTC, and Clayton, Dubilier and Rice teaming up with McKesson to take Option Car...

Anthropic wants to go public at a reported valuation above $2 trillion. According to its IPO prospectus as reviewed by Reuters, it lost about $42 billion last year, and roughly $34 billion of that was a non-cash accounting charge. The number I care about is different. Reuters reports at least $518 billion in cloud, compute, and infrastructure commitments, and about 80 percent of it is owed whether...

The Paramount Warner Bros deal just cleared its biggest obstacle nine days before a $7 million a day ticking fee was set to start. Charles Oglesby and I break down why that timing matters and what it teaches you about buying a business at any size. Paramount beat Netflix for Warner Bros Discovery with $31 a share in cash, a $7 billion regulatory termination fee, and a promise to cover the Netflix...

Six weeks ago Big Tech was buying AI companies. This month it stopped buying companies and started buying control points. In this no-guest reaction episode, Charles and I break down six real deals from the last two weeks and translate every single one into a move you can run on a 1 million to 5 million dollar business. The headlines call this an AI boom. It is a control grab. Every one of these de...

Six megadeals. One week. One playbook every acquisition entrepreneur needs to run. In this reaction episode, Charles and I break down the biggest week in M and A this year, and we translate every single deal from Wall Street numbers into Main Street mechanics. If you are an SBA buyer, a lower-middle-market operator, a lender, or an owner thinking about your exit, this one is for you. Here is what...

Ten thousand boomers a day are aging toward an exit, and four hundred miles up the coast a 111 billion dollar media merger is bleeding money because it cannot get out of its own way. Same week, same country, same question underneath both. In this one Charles and I skip the guest chair and just read the tape on what is actually hot in M&A right now. We break down the Paramount and Warner Bros....

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...

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...

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 inve...

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 l...

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, a...

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...

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 to...

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 landscapin...

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...

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...

I sat down with Gregory Kofsky, owner of IBA one of the most established business brokerage firms in the Pacific Northwest who has personally closed over 300 transactions ranging from 500K neighborhood businesses to 30 million dollar manufacturing operations, wineries, staffing firms, and tech companies. He took over the firm at 33 years old and has been running it for 32 years. In this episode we...

Hadley Nightingale grew up in New Zealand wanting to be a farmer, spent 8 years driving road trains in the Australian Outback hauling iron ore, came back in 2015, and went all in on building a property portfolio. His first buy was a house other people literally walked out of at the open home. Mold on the ceilings, drug paraphernalia on the windows, buyers calling it disgusting. He bought it, renov...

Most people on Instagram are still trying to start a business in 2026 — picking niches, building Shopify stores, praying the algorithm hits. Meanwhile thousands of profitable businesses are listed for sale right now with customers, revenue, and systems already running, and almost nobody is looking at them. Today's guest figured that out. Kenna XAI left her 9 to 5, traveled the world, tried eve...

Boring businesses make millionaires while everyone else chases the next sexy AI startup or drop shipping play. In this episode of Buy Build Exit, Roy Redd and Charles Oglesby sit down with Andre Harrison, a retired mobile notary instructor who bought his first house at 22 with no degree, built 3 notary companies in New York and New Jersey, and steered them straight through the 2008 financial crash...