Who publishes this, and why

1. What this is

A reference built from a federal file. The Small Business Administration records every 7(a) loan it approves, including a code identifying loans made to finance the purchase of an existing business. Filtered that way, the file becomes a register of 40,612 completed small business acquisitions, each with an amount, a term, a rate, a lender, an industry and a county.

From those rows the site builds 19 sector pages, 147 industry group pages, 52 state pages, 315 county pages, 151 lender pages and 328 state-by-sector pages. Attached to them is a layer of practitioner writing about how these transactions actually work.

Everything is free, nothing is gated behind an email address, and there is no calculator that produces a number about your business. That last omission is deliberate and explained below.

2. Who publishes it

LMMMA is published by FIH.com, a mergers and acquisitions advisory firm, and operated by QEIP LLC. FIH advises owners of privately held companies on sale processes: preparing a business for sale, approaching buyers, and negotiating terms.

FIH acts as an intermediary in the purchase and sale of privately held companies. It does not conduct public offerings, does not engage in general solicitation of securities, does not provide investment advice, and does not take custody of funds or securities. Nothing on this site is an offer to buy or sell anything, and no business is listed for sale anywhere on it.

3. Why an advisory firm builds this

Two honest reasons. The first is that owners deciding whether to sell are working from bad information, and it is genuinely useful to fix that. The published statistics about this market are drawn from transactions twenty times larger than the businesses reading them. The federal file that would correct this is public, free, and effectively unread, because 900,000 rows of loan records is not a thing most people can turn into an answer.

The second is commercial and there is no point pretending otherwise. An owner who reads something useful here may remember the name when they decide to sell. That is the entire business case, and it only works if the reference is genuinely good, which is a helpful alignment.

What that means in practice is that the data pages are built as if the commercial side did not exist, and the commercial side appears as a clearly marked box at the end of a page rather than woven into the analysis.

4. The rules we hold ourselves to

No client is ever named or described. FIH engagements are confidential. Nothing on this site refers to a transaction FIH has advised on, no example is drawn from one, and no anonymised case study appears anywhere. A description detailed enough to be interesting is usually detailed enough to be identified, so the rule is absolute rather than careful.

Nothing proprietary is published. Every figure comes from public data. No pipeline, no mandate, no buyer list and no non-public information appears here in any form.

No valuation tool. Several sites will give an owner a number in three minutes. We will not, because a number produced from four inputs is not a valuation, and publishing one to collect an email address would undermine everything else on this site. The multiples page explains why the published multiples people find instead do not apply either.

No promises. Nothing here predicts what any business will sell for, or promises an outcome, a price, a multiple or a timetable.

No paid placement. Lenders are ranked by arithmetic on a public file. No lender pays to appear, none is recommended, and FIH has no commercial relationship with any of them. See Disclosures.

Uncertainty is published. Every figure carries the file it came from and the number of rows behind it. Groups too small to be meaningful are named rather than quietly dropped. Where the data cannot support a claim, the claim is omitted rather than softened. The methodology page lists what was excluded and why, including things that would have made the site look better.

5. The gap we are trying to fill

There is a hole in the middle of the public record. Below roughly $5M of financing, the SBA file describes the market in detail. Above roughly $50M of enterprise value, announced transactions are disclosed with multiples attached. Between those two points sits the lower middle market, and almost nothing public measures it.

This site does not close that gap, because no dataset can. What it does is describe both edges honestly, so that an owner in the middle can at least see where they sit and stop applying numbers that belong to a different market.

6. Contact

For corrections, see the corrections page. For anything else, including a confidential conversation about a possible sale, use the contact form.