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 the country. Alan has personally funded more than 300 million dollars in SBA loans across his career, including over 70 million last year alone. He lives at the exact point where most first time acquisitions fall apart, the financing.We get into the new citizenship eligibility rules, the truth about 10 percent down and the standby note structure, why good deals quietly die at the closing table, the idea of the SBA as a golden handcuff once you cross 5 million dollars, and exactly what to do this week if you have an LOI in hand. We close with a rapid fire round packed with quotable answers for first time buyers.If you have been thinking about buying a business this year, this is the financing playbook you have been missing.Timestamps are below. Drop your questions in the comments and I will answer as many as I can in the first hour.dealflow-os.comhttps://buybuildexitwithroyredd.subst...@buybuildexitBuy Build Exit Academy - https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-...

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 today, just six hot topics in about an hour.We cover how private equity is using MSO structures to get around the rule that blocks non lawyers from owning law firms, why a Louisiana personal injury firm partnering with a PE backed investor in January 2026 might be the first domino in a massive legal industry roll up, and why law firm multiples are already moving from the historical four to six times EBITDA range toward eight to twelve times for sponsor backed platforms.Then we get into the SBA changes that went into effect March first 2026. New citizenship requirements, a six month ownership lookback, the end of the automated credit score fast track for small loans, and a collateral threshold that dropped from five hundred thousand dollars down to fifty thousand dollars. If your plan was just get an SBA loan, this episode tells you what changed underneath you.We also break down the dental and veterinary roll up landscape, why twenty one plus PE backed dental platforms now support around fifteen percent of all dentists in the country, why vet medicine is roughly five years behind that curve, and what that timeline tells you about where your own industry might be headed.Plus the bigger 2026 M and A picture, why this is being called a conviction cycle instead of a volume cycle, what four point three trillion dollars in private equity dry powder actually means for buyers at every size, and why every one of these headlines points back to the same four step playbook you can run on a business worth one and a half million dollars instead of one and a half billion.If you are serious about buying, building, or exiting a business, this is the kind of episode that changes how you read the news.Try Deal Flow OS free and let AI find motivated sellers in your target industry before anyone else gets there.Join the free class inside Buy Build Exit Academy and learn the exact framework for your first acquisition.LINKSdealflow-os.comhttps://buybuildexitwithroyredd.subst...IG: @buybuildexitFree Class: Buy Build Exit Academy — https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-...

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 landscaping businesses nobody is tweeting about.In this all listener question episode, Charles and I answer the questions you keep sending in. We connect the headlines to the opportunity. The headlines are IPOs. The opportunity is acquisitions.Here is what we get into:Whether you should actually buy the SpaceX IPO or if you are buying the top. Why a 1.77 trillion dollar valuation means you are buying a story, not a business, and why cash flow is the only truth that matters.Whether Anthropic going public at almost a trillion is a smart buy or dot com 2.0. Two things can be true. Claude can be a great product and the valuation can still be ahead of itself. I build on the Anthropic API inside Deal Flow OS, so I break down the operator angle versus the investor angle.What the IPO floodgate actually means for a normal operator running a 2 million dollar landscaping company. When the top of the market is liquid, capital flows down. The exit window reopens for everyone underneath it.Whether M and A is actually back or just headlines. Private equity is sitting on roughly 4.3 trillion dollars in dry powder that has to get deployed, and deal value is climbing faster than deal volume.The silver tsunami and whether the window is closing on you. Around 12 million boomers own businesses and an estimated 10 trillion dollars in assets is changing hands. You are not late. You are early to a five to ten year transfer.Whether you are too late to roll up HVAC, plumbing, or septic now that PE is buying everything. This is my actual lane. I break down the multiple arbitrage that drives every roll up and why you compete below the big platforms, not against them.How to actually finance a roll up. SBA versus seller financing versus conventional. Why seller financing is the independent buyer superpower.Whether you should start an AI startup or buy a boring business that already prints money.Plus a headline deal hot take round and a rapid fire listener question segment to close it out.Everybody wants to own the AI company. I would rather own the company that pumps the AI company septic tank and gets paid every quarter, recession or not.Buy smart. Build relentlessly. Exit rich.If you got value from this, subscribe and share it with the one friend who keeps saying they want to buy a business but never does.LINKS Try it free - https://dealflow-os.comSubscribe to my newsletter - https://buybuildexitwithroyredd.substack.com/Follow me on Instagram - @buybuildexitFree Class - https://www.skool.com/buy-build-exit-academy-8709/about