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Jul 30 •
👋 Welcome to Business Broker Circle — Start Here
You made it. Whether you're brand new to brokerage or already searching for a business to buy, you're in the right place. Ian and I built this community because we wished it existed when we started. Everything in here — the curriculum, the scripts, the tools, the weekly calls — comes directly from what we use to close real deals at Baton Strategies. No theory. No fluff. Just the system. Here's everything you need to know to get started: 📚 Step 1 — Start the Curriculum Head to the Classroom tab and start with Module 1. The lessons are short, practical, and sequenced in the order you'll actually need them. Work through it at your own pace — but don't just read. Do the thing. The brokers who close their first deal fastest are the ones who take action between lessons, not the ones who finish the curriculum first. 🤖 Step 2 — Unlock Your AI Tools, Scripts and Templates All 9 broker tools, your outreach scripts, legal templates, and resources live at businessbrokercircle.com To get in, use the access code below — enter it once and you're unlocked for 30 days (you'll need to enter the code every 30 days) across everything on the site: 🔑 Access Code: ………….🔑 (when you become a premium member, we’ll send you the access code) Bookmark businessbrokercircle.com after you log in so you can get back quickly from any lesson. 🎙️ Step 3 — Join Us Live Every Wednesday Every Wednesday we host a live Q&A with me and Ian. Bring your real questions, your active deals, your objections, your seller conversations — anything. Nothing is too basic and nothing is off limits. 📅 Every Wednesday · 11am MST Link is pinned in the Calendar tab — RSVP so you get the reminder. 💬 Step 4 — Introduce Yourself Drop a post in the community and tell us: - Where you're based - What your target niche or industry is - Where you are in the journey — brand new, already searching, or actively brokering This is how you get on our radar and how other members know to send deals your way. The brokers who show up in the community are the ones who get referrals. Don't be a ghost.
22h •
Closes are the wrong scoreboard.
Ask a new broker how they're doing and you'll hear about closes. "Haven't closed anything yet." "Still waiting on my first deal." Closes are a lagging indicator. They tell you how you were doing months ago. The number that tells you how you're doing right now is owner conversations per month. Real ones, with an owner on the other end talking about their business and their future. Not emails sent. Not voicemails. Not LinkedIn connections. Most people starting out don't track it. That's a problem, because listings take time to win, time to market, and time to close. A brand-new broker with no close yet may be right on track, or badly behind, and the only way to tell is to count conversations. What tracking looks like, and it doesn't need to be fancy: • One line per conversation: date, owner, business, what they said about timing. • A monthly total. That's your number. • The trend over time, not whether a deal happened to land this month. Tracking also protects you from the worst reaction in this business: changing everything after a bad month. Steady conversations and no close means you're in the gap. If conversations dropped, that's the problem, and it's one you can fix. Track conversations, not closes. How are you tracking your conversations right now?
4d •
Why brokers go broke in year one.
New brokers who don't make it past year one rarely fail because they couldn't value a business or write a CIM. More often, it's one of three things. 1. They stop prospecting once a deal is on the hook. A listing turns into an LOI, and suddenly that one deal is the whole week. Every call is about it. Every hour goes into it. Then it dies in diligence, the pipeline is empty, and it's back to zero, months behind. 2. They never build their own lead generation. Referrals, Skool posts, warm intros: great when they show up, but they aren't a system. If your next owner conversation depends on someone else deciding to send you one, you don't control your pipeline. Whether you make the calls yourself or pay for help with them, someone has to fill the top of the funnel on purpose. 3. They're undercapitalized for the gap. Deals close in lumps, months apart. Prospecting, the listing, marketing, the LOI and diligence: none of it moves on your schedule. Without a cushion, people make desperate decisions. Taking bad listings. Pushing sellers too hard. Quitting right before it would have worked. All three come back to the same fix: prospecting doesn't pause when you get a listing. A live deal is exactly when you need more conversations, not fewer. Plenty of listings never close. If your one listing is your whole pipeline, the odds are already against you. So here's the honest question: are you still prospecting, or did the last deal become the only thing you're doing?
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5d •
Seller's discretionary earnings: the number buyers actually care about.
Owners tend to talk about revenue. Buyers tend to ask about earnings. The gap between the two is where a lot of first valuations go wrong. Seller's discretionary earnings, or SDE, is a way of answering one question: what does this business actually produce for one owner-operator? You start with net profit on the books, then add back expenses that won't carry over to a new owner: • The owner's own salary and benefits • Interest, depreciation and amortization • One-time costs that won't repeat • Personal expenses run through the business The add-backs are where you earn your keep. Every one has to be documented and defensible, because a buyer and a lender are going to test each line. An add-back you can't prove is just a story. A good habit: for each add-back, write down where the proof lives. A receipt, a statement, a payroll record. If you can't point to it, don't count it. Clean, defensible SDE does more for a listing than an optimistic one. What's the add-back you see owners argue for most often?
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7d •
A listing that isn't moving is telling you something.
A listing that isn't moving is telling you something. Your job is to figure out what. When a listing stalls, the instinct is to wait it out or blame the market. Usually the cause is closer to home, and it tends to fall into one of three buckets. • Price. The asking number is anchored to what the owner needs or hopes for, not to what the business earns. Buyers look, run the math, and move on quietly. • Package. The financials are messy, the add-backs aren't documented, or the story of the business is hard to follow. Buyers can't get comfortable, so they don't engage. • Access. Buyers ask questions and wait too long for answers, or the owner is hard to reach. Momentum fades, and buyers assume something is wrong. The fix starts with an honest look at which bucket you're in. Each one needs a different conversation with the seller, and the earlier you have it, the easier it is. A stalled listing isn't a verdict on the business. It's feedback on the price, the package, or the access. When a listing stalls, which bucket do you check first?
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Learn to sell businesses. Become a business broker from active M&A advisors who've closed ~$100M in deals. Tools, scripts, templates & live coaching.
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