How this site makes money

1. Every revenue line

There is one. This site is published by FIH.com to make owners of privately held companies aware of FIH when they decide to sell. If an owner reads something useful here and later engages FIH as an adviser on a sale, FIH earns an advisory fee from that engagement.

That is the complete list. Specifically, this site does not:

• sell advertising, sponsorship or paid placement of any kind;
• carry affiliate links, and links to third parties earn nothing;
• sell data, reports, subscriptions or access to anything;
• take payment from any lender, broker, bank or service provider;
• sell, rent or share visitor information with anyone.

There is no paywall and no email gate. Every figure on the site is visible without giving anything in return.

2. What money cannot buy

Because the only revenue line is advisory work, the risk is not that a sponsor distorts a page. It is that the site quietly shades its analysis toward selling. The rules that guard against that:

The data pages are computed, not written. Every figure is arithmetic on a public federal file, produced by a script, and the script is the same for every page. Nothing is hand-adjusted, and no page has a figure chosen for it.

No valuation tool. The obvious lead-generation instrument for a firm like ours is a calculator that produces an encouraging number in exchange for an email address. We do not publish one, because it would produce a figure the data cannot support.

The unflattering findings stay. The site publishes that close to one in eleven approved acquisition loans is cancelled, that published multiples do not apply to most readers, and that the market this site measures is only the bottom of the one it is named after. None of that helps sell advisory services. All of it is true.

Commercial invitations are marked. Where the site asks you to get in touch, it does so in a clearly bounded box at the end of a page, never inside the analysis and never disguised as a finding.

3. Lenders and rankings

The site names and ranks the banks that write acquisition loans. FIH has no commercial relationship with any lender named on this site, receives no referral fee, revenue share or consideration of any kind from any of them, and does not recommend one over another.

Rankings are arithmetic on the SBA's own file: a count of loans, sorted. A lender cannot pay to appear, to rank higher, or to be removed. Nothing on a lender page is a credit reference, an assessment of the institution, or advice about who to borrow from.

4. How FIH operates

FIH acts as an intermediary in the purchase and sale of privately held companies. It does not conduct or participate in public offerings. It does not engage in general solicitation or general advertising of securities. It does not provide investment advice, does not recommend securities, and does not take custody of or handle funds or securities belonging to any party to a transaction.

This site is a publication. It is not an offer to buy or sell any business, security or interest, it is not a solicitation of any offer, and no business is listed or offered for sale anywhere on it. No content here should be relied on as legal, tax, accounting or investment advice, and no figure on it is a valuation of any particular business.

Nothing on this site promises or predicts an outcome, a price, a multiple, a timetable or a result of any kind, and no statement here should be read as a guarantee about any transaction.

5. Client confidentiality

FIH engagements are confidential. No client of FIH is named, described, alluded to or used as an example anywhere on this site. No transaction FIH has advised on is referred to, in any form, including anonymised or composite descriptions.

This is stricter than it needs to be by law, and deliberately so. A case study detailed enough to be interesting is usually detailed enough for a competitor, a customer or an employee to identify. The only safe rule is not to write them at all.

Nothing derived from FIH's non-public work appears here: no pipeline, no mandates, no buyer lists, no proprietary research. Every figure on the site is computed from public federal data that anyone can download.

6. What we refuse to publish

• Individual loan records. The SBA file contains borrower names and street addresses. Nothing at that grain appears here. Every page is an aggregate.
• Estimated purchase prices. They are not in the data. Inferring them would produce numbers that look authoritative and are invented.
• Anything presented as a valuation of a specific business.
• Businesses for sale. This is a reference, not a marketplace, and nothing on it is offered for sale.
• Figures we cannot source. Where a number could not be traced to a named file it was left out rather than approximated.

7. Ownership and related properties

LMMMA is operated by QEIP LLC, which operates a number of other reference and publishing properties. Where data is shared between them it is disclosed on the methodology page, as it is for the announced-transaction set used on the multiples page.

Links from this site to other properties in the same group earn no commission and are not paid placements, but they are related parties and are disclosed as such wherever they appear.

8. How this site is produced

The data pipeline is code: two scripts that read the federal files and write the aggregates every page reads at build time. The site is static, so every reader sees identical figures and no page is generated per request.

The written material is produced with editorial and software tooling including AI assistance, and is reviewed before publication. Responsibility for everything published here rests with the publisher, not with any tool. Errors are corrected and logged on the corrections page.

Questions about any of this go through the contact form.