If you are looking for a business to acquire by searching BizBuySell, you are finding businesses that could not find a buyer any other way. That is a strong claim but it reflects a structural reality about how SMB transactions work.
How businesses end up listed
A business owner who lists their company publicly has typically already gone through several steps: they hired a business broker or M&A advisor, agreed to pay a commission of 8 to 12 percent of the transaction value, approved a confidential information memorandum, set an asking price, and listed on one or more public marketplaces. Each step in this process filters out certain types of owners.
Owners who are highly motivated to sell at a fair price to the right buyer often sell quietly through their network before ever engaging a broker. Owners who want a premium and are willing to run a formal process do engage brokers. The result: the listed pool skews toward businesses where the owner has specific price expectations and is comfortable with a competitive process.
The off-market opportunity
The off-market pool is much larger and, on average, structurally more favorable to buyers. An owner who has never considered selling but is open to a conversation when approached thoughtfully has no anchor price, no broker fighting for a higher multiple, and no auction dynamics. The buyer defines the terms of engagement.
Off-market does not mean distressed. The best off-market businesses are profitable, well-run, and owned by someone who simply has not yet started the exit process. They are not listed because they have not decided to sell, not because no one wants to buy them.
What the data shows
Transaction multiples on off-market acquisitions are consistently lower than comparable on-market deals. A well-executed direct outreach program producing an exclusive conversation with a motivated owner can result in a deal at 3 to 4 times EBITDA in an industry where broker-intermediated transactions regularly clear 5 to 6 times. On a $1M EBITDA business, that is a $1M to $2M difference in purchase price, often the difference between a transaction that works financially and one that does not.
The trade-off
Off-market sourcing requires more upfront investment. You need a large, high-quality target list. You need a systematic outreach process. You need to track responses and follow up over months or years. And you need patience, the owner who is not ready to sell today may be ready in 12 months, which means your pipeline needs to be long-term.
On-market sourcing is faster to initiate but slower to close well. You can have a letter of intent signed within 60 days of discovering a listed business, but the diligence often reveals the problems the listing price did not account for.
A hybrid approach
The most effective acquirers run both programs simultaneously. They maintain active relationships with 5 to 10 business brokers in their target verticals (accepting that broker deals will trade at premium multiples) while running a proprietary off-market outreach campaign targeting the 1,000 best-fit businesses in their universe. The off-market program produces one deal every 12 to 18 months at favorable multiples. The broker network fills gaps with speed when a specific acquisition is needed quickly.
Serava is built for off-market acquisition sourcing. We surface scored, ranked acquisition targets across 37 industries that have never engaged a sell-side advisor. Free for buyers.
Get access