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The Smart Way to Sell Your Business in 2026

Updated April 2026 · Christoph Totter, CT Acquisitions

You built it over 10, 20, 30 years. You shouldn’t have to hand a broker $300,000 to $1,000,000 just to find a buyer we already know. You shouldn’t have to sign a 12-month exclusivity contract to find out whether any of this is worth your time. And you shouldn’t have to sell to whoever writes the highest check, then watch them gut the team you spent a decade building.

We get you a top-of-market price and the right buyer. Both. Because we get paid more when your sale price is higher — same incentive as a banker — except the buyer pays us, not you.

The five pillars of how we work

A note from me, before we go further

I’m Christoph. I run CT Acquisitions. I’ve watched a lot of owners get put through a process they didn’t need, pay fees they didn’t owe, and end up with buyers who weren’t right for the company they spent their lives building.

I don’t run an investment bank. I’m not a broker. I’m not trying to become either. What I do is narrow: I have working relationships with a defined group of buyers — search funders, family offices, lower middle-market private equity, and strategic acquirers including some of the largest consolidators in their categories — who pay me to find businesses that fit their mandates.

If at any point this feels like a sales pitch, push back. I’d rather have a direct conversation than one where you’re nodding while quietly disagreeing.

How the old way works (and why it costs you)

A traditional sell-side advisor or broker takes your business to market. That means:

You pay them. Standard broker commissions on businesses under $1M sale price are 8–12%, with 10% being typical. Mid-market success fees run 3–6%, plus monthly retainers of $5K–$25K for 6–12 months. On a $5M sale, that’s roughly $350,000 in commission paid out of your check at close — calculated using the Lehman or Double Lehman scale.

You sign an exclusivity contract. Most sell-side engagements lock you in for 6–12 months. You can’t talk to other advisors. You can’t quietly entertain a buyer who shows up on your own. You can’t change your mind without paying a tail fee.

They run a process. They prepare a 40–60 page Confidential Information Memorandum. They build a buyer list, send teasers, manage NDAs, run twenty buyer meetings, host management presentations. They collect IOIs, then LOIs, then due diligence. Six to twelve months of negotiation and paperwork that sellers describe as exhausting.

Your business gets shopped. Information leakage during marketing is common and rising. Employees get nervous. Customers ask questions. Competitors smell blood.

The process optimizes for one number. Highest bidder wins. The buyer who actually fits your team, your customers, and your legacy — the one who’d be the right home for what you built — usually doesn’t pay the highest headline number on day one. So they lose the auction. And you sell to whoever writes the biggest check, regardless of what they plan to do with your company.

The deal goes stale. Sophisticated buyers know what “been on the market” looks like. Seller fatigue is a documented phenomenon buyers actively use against sellers in late-stage negotiations.

You hand over six figures, lose six to twelve months, expose your business to the market, sign a contract you can’t get out of, and end up with a price that, after the broker takes their cut, is roughly the same number you would have gotten in a quiet conversation with the right buyer. Except now the “right buyer” is whoever bid highest, not whoever fits best.

How we work, specifically

We don’t represent sellers. We work with buy-side capital — the buyers themselves:

• Search funders (individuals raising money to buy and run a single company).
• Family offices (private investment offices for wealthy families, often with 10–25 year hold horizons).
• Lower middle-market private equity firms.
• Strategic acquirers, including some of the largest consolidators in their categories. In home services, for example, we have direct mandates with tier-one strategics that other intermediaries pitch into blind. We don’t pitch in. We’re already in.

All of them have signed agreements with us to find businesses that match what they’re looking for.

That means we know our buyers. We know who wants to operate the business themselves and treat the team like family. We know who holds for 20 years and reinvests. We know who wants you to stay on as CEO with rollover equity. We know who’s looking for a strategic add-on. We know the difference because we’ve placed deals with all of them.

You talk to one or two buyers we already know are looking for a business like yours. Privately. Without a process. Quickly. And matched on more than price, while still getting top-of-market on the price itself. You pay us nothing. The buyer pays us.

Fee comparison: what sellers actually pay, by path

We charge you nothing because the buyer compensates us when the deal closes. No retainer. No success fee. No minimum. Nothing comes out of your check at the closing table.

What we’re not (so you can compare cleanly)

We’re not a sell-side broker. We don’t represent you, we don’t market your business, we don’t take a fee from you.

We’re not a buy-side broker either. A buy-side broker is hired by one buyer to find one specific kind of business and pitch it to anyone who fits. They represent the buyer’s interests aggressively, often pushing for the lowest defensible price.

We’re a deal originator with a buyer network. We have ongoing relationships with a network of buyers, each with their own mandate. We’re not pushing for any single buyer’s preferred price — we’re matching businesses to the buyer in our network whose mandate fits best. Our fee scales with sale price, so our economics align with you getting a strong number, not with the buyer getting a discount.

Top-of-market price AND the right buyer. Here’s how that actually works.

Top-of-market price is the floor. Fit is how we pick which fairly-priced buyer you actually meet.

Care for your team. Some of our buyers are operators who’ll keep your people, honor existing compensation, and treat the company like a long-term hold. Others cut costs from day one. We know which is which. You’ll only meet the right one for what you want.

Legacy and brand continuity. If your name is on the building and you want it to stay there, we have buyers who specifically buy because of brand strength and won’t touch it. If you don’t care, fine, we have buyers for that too.

Rollover equity, where the deal structure supports it. Often called “getting paid a second time.” You take 60–80% of the sale price in cash today, and the remaining 20–40% gets converted into shares of the new combined business. Three to seven years later, when the buyer sells the larger company, your shares pay out a second time. Sellers who structure this well often make more on the second exit than they did on the first cash payout. Rollover doesn’t fit every deal. Search funder acquisitions often involve seller financing instead, where you get paid over time and earn interest. Strategic acquisitions sometimes involve earnouts tied to performance. The right structure depends on the buyer and your goals. We walk you through the options that fit before any introduction.

Your role going forward. Want out clean in 90 days? We have buyers for that. Want to stay on as CEO for 3–5 years and ride the rollover? We have buyers for that. Want to stay on the board as chairman? We have buyers for that too.

A fair question worth answering directly: “If your buyers know you’ll match on fit, won’t they assume they can underbid because they’re ‘the right cultural match’?”

No, and the structural reason matters. We’re paid by the buyer based on the final sale price. Our incentive is to match well and at a top-of-market price. We won’t introduce a seller to a buyer at below-market multiples just because the cultural fit is good. That hurts us as much as it hurts you.

If you want a second opinion on what fair-market actually is, we’ll tell you exactly what your sector multiples are running and recommend you get an independent valuation (a Quality of Earnings report) for $5,000 to $15,000 before you sign any letter of intent. That’s $5K–$15K versus the $300K to $1M a banker would charge to tell you the same number.

The truth nobody in this industry says out loud

The market is the market. A pre-qualified buyer knows what your business is worth within a tight band before they walk in the room. They look at your sector multiples, your EBITDA quality, your customer concentration, your growth profile. They’ve seen 100 businesses like yours.

A “competitive process” can deliver maybe a 5 to 10 percent premium on a good day. The advisor takes 5 to 10 percent as their fee. Net to you: roughly the same number, plus six to twelve months of life lost, plus the wrong buyer for your team because the auction optimized on the wrong variable.

You have two options:

• Pay a banker $300K to $1M to introduce you to the “highest bidder,” who may or may not be the right home for what you built — and pay a couple percent more.
• Let the buyer pay us. Meet one of them, chosen for both top-of-market price and fit. Keep your full check. And if you want, keep upside through rollover.

Who this is for

Owners of profitable businesses who want to talk to the right buyer in 30 to 60 days, in private, with zero cost to them, and who want a top-of-market price and care about who buys their business.

The size range we work in is broad. Our buyers’ mandates run from search funders looking at $500K EBITDA businesses (often even $1M revenue is enough if the unit economics are clean) all the way up to lower middle-market private equity and strategics looking at $5M to $25M EBITDA. The right fit depends less on size and more on whether your business matches one of our buyers’ active mandates: sector, geography, growth profile, owner transition timeline, and a few other factors we’ll cover on the call.

Who this isn’t for, honestly

If your business is in a category where we don’t have an active buyer mandate, we’ll tell you on the first call. Sectors where our network is currently strong: home services, industrial services, healthcare services, niche manufacturing, B2B services, and a few others.

If you want a long, structured education in the M&A process, hire a sell-side advisor. They earn their fee partly through that education. We move faster than that and assume you already roughly know what you want.

If your books aren’t ready — no clean financials, no separation of owner-discretionary expenses, no defensible add-backs — we can’t help you yet. A buyer can’t act on a business they can’t underwrite. We know good accountants who specialize in sale prep and will point you to one.

If you’re looking for a service that matches a precise emotional script (“we’ll honor everything your father built, exactly as you imagined it”), we’re not that. We’re matching on real criteria, not selling you a story. Sometimes the right buyer for your business will do things differently than you would have. That’s part of selling.

And here’s the part most sellers don’t believe at first

There’s no contract. No exclusivity. No risk to you. None.

We don’t ask you to sign an exclusivity agreement. We don’t ask you to sign anything at all until a buyer is sitting across from you at the closing table — and even then, the agreement is between you and the buyer, not you and us. Our fee is between us and them.

That means:

• If you take a discovery call with us and decide we’re not the right fit, you walk. No tail fee. No “we still get paid if you sell to anyone in the next 12 months.” Nothing.
• If we introduce you to a buyer and you don’t like them, you walk. We bring you another, or we don’t. Your call.
• If you go through the whole conversation, decide our buyer isn’t paying enough, and want to hire a sell-side banker the next day to run a full auction, you can. We have zero claim on you, your business, or any future deal you do with anyone else.
• If you take everything we tell you on the discovery call — the sector multiples, the buyer landscape, the structural advice on rollover — and use it to negotiate a better deal with a banker you hire afterwards, that’s fine too. You owe us nothing.

This isn’t generosity. It’s structurally how our business works. We don’t run a 9-month process that requires us to lock you up to recoup our time. We do introductions to pre-mandated buyers we already know. If the match works, we get paid by them at close. If it doesn’t, we move on.

A small honest note on why we structure it this way: we lose deals sometimes by not having a contract. A seller takes our discovery call, learns what their business is worth, takes our framing on rollover or buyer types, and then hires a banker anyway. It happens. We’ve decided we’d rather lose those deals than have to chase sellers with tail-fee clauses. The economics of our model only make sense when sellers genuinely want to work with us, so we let everyone else go.

You can spend 30 minutes on a call with us and walk away with three things you didn’t have before: a clear read on what your business is actually worth in today’s market, a sense of which buyer types fit your goals, and the option to meet one of them.

If none of that is useful to you, you’ve lost 30 minutes. If any of it is, you’ve shortcut what most sellers spend 9 months and $300,000 to find out.

The straightforward path

1. 30-minute discovery call. We learn your business, what you want from a sale, what kind of buyer fits both financially and culturally.
2. We match. If we have a buyer whose mandate fits your sector, size, structure, geography, intentions for the business, and willingness to do rollover if you want it, we tell you who they are and how the introduction would work.
3. One conversation. A direct meeting with a real buyer. Not a teaser. Not an NDA gauntlet. A conversation between two principals who can move.
4. If it’s a fit, we move. Diligence and close in 60 to 120 days. If it’s not, we have backup buyers warm in the background. No restart. No process collapse.

You pay nothing throughout. Ever. And you can walk at any point with no cost and no contractual hook.

Two things to know

We can’t help everyone. We work with profitable businesses where we can find a real buyer. If your numbers aren’t ready or your business isn’t a fit for our buyers’ mandates, we’ll tell you straight away and save you the time.

We won’t shop you. Sequential introduction — we bring buyers to you one at a time, not all at once — is non-negotiable. Your discretion is the asset we protect most aggressively, because we know what a leak costs.

Ready to have the conversation?

30 minutes. No contract. No cost. You leave with a read on your market value and a sense of which buyer types fit your goals.

Book a 30-Min Call Free Valuation Tool

Frequently asked questions about how we work

Do I pay CT Acquisitions anything?

Nothing. Ever. The buyer compensates us when the deal closes. No retainer, no listing fee, no success fee, no commission to sellers at any point.

Do I have to sign an exclusivity contract?

No. You don’t sign anything at all until you’re at the closing table with a buyer, and even then, the agreement is between you and the buyer. You can walk at any point with zero cost and no tail fees.

Will you still push for a strong price if the buyer pays you?

Yes. Our fee scales with final sale price. A higher price for you = a higher fee for us. That’s the same structural incentive a sell-side banker has; the only difference is who writes our check. We won’t introduce sellers to buyers at below-market multiples just because the cultural fit is good — that hurts us as much as it hurts you.

How many buyers will I meet?

One or two, pre-qualified and pre-matched to your profile. Not twenty. Sequential introduction — one buyer at a time — is non-negotiable because discretion is the asset we protect most aggressively.

How long does the process take?

60 to 120 days from first buyer meeting to close, for well-prepared businesses. We can move that fast because we already know the buyers’ mandates before we pick up the phone with you.

What size businesses do you work with?

Our buyers’ mandates run from search funders looking at $500K EBITDA (sometimes $1M revenue is enough if unit economics are clean) up to lower middle-market PE and strategics looking at $5M to $25M EBITDA. Fit depends on sector, geography, growth profile, and owner transition timeline more than size alone.

Which sectors do you cover?

Home services, industrial services, healthcare services, niche manufacturing, B2B services, and a few others. If your sector isn’t one we currently have active buyer mandates in, we’ll tell you on the first call and save you the time.

What if your buyer isn’t paying enough?

Walk. Hire a sell-side banker the next day if you want. We have zero claim on you, your business, or any future deal. You can even use our valuation read and buyer-landscape framing to negotiate a better deal somewhere else. You owe us nothing.

Will you help with rollover equity or seller financing?

Yes. Rollover equity (keeping 20–40% of the sale in shares of the new company that pay out again when the buyer exits) is a primary match question, not an afterthought. Seller financing (common in search funder deals) and earnouts (common in strategic deals) are similar. We walk through the options that fit your goals before any buyer introduction.

What’s the catch?

There isn’t one structural catch. The honest limits: (1) if your sector isn’t one of our active buyer categories, we can’t help; (2) if your books aren’t clean, we can’t introduce you yet; (3) we won’t fabricate a cultural fit — sometimes the right buyer will do things differently than you would have. Those are real trade-offs we’re upfront about. Everything else is as described.