Last updated: August 2026
Most ETA coursework hands you a case and a set of assumptions. What it rarely hands you is a live list of real companies with the public records attached, and that list is where a search actually starts. Scouly's free tier and open dataset cover a term project or a semester of club sourcing sprints. No budget, no faculty license.
The Explorer tier is free with no card. Browse all 173,769 tracked companies across seven verticals (HVAC and plumbing, dental, manufacturing, landscaping, auto repair, funeral homes, veterinary) and unlock 10 full profiles. A profile carries SBA 7(a)/504 loan history, registry longevity, local establishment density and the deterministic 0 to 100 score built from them. Every number links back to the public file it came from, so a professor can audit your work line by line. Ten unlocks is enough to write a thesis and defend a shortlist. Operator is $35 a month with unlimited unlocks, for a live search.
The SBA maturity wall dataset is public domain under CC0. Use it in a paper or a club deck, credit optional. The file is sba-maturity-wall.csv: 4,218 rows counting 66,307 SBA loans by the year each comes due, cut four ways (national, state, metro, vertical). Maturities run 1993 to 2056, and 12,945 loans nationally come due between 2026 and 2030.
The national file plus five regional cuts, so a club can hand each member a smaller download:
Want a cut that isn't published, say every dental loan in the Big Ten footprint? Email nishkal.dachepelly@gmail.com and I'll generate it.
A two-hour session for four to eight people. Ohio manufacturing is the fifth deepest state and vertical pairing in the US data, behind California and Texas. Nobody runs out of targets.
Setup. Scouly tracks 2,819 manufacturers in Ohio. Of the 2,546 Ohio SBA loans in the file across all seven verticals, 959 sit with manufacturers, and the state median loan is $425,450. Deepest metros: Cleveland-Elyria 754, Cincinnati 466, Akron 256, Dayton 244, Columbus 210.
Step 1. Everyone writes a one-page thesis before touching the data, using how to write an acquisition thesis. Size band, owner profile, geography, year-one plan. Ten minutes, no research.
Step 2. Split the room by metro and open the thesis builder. Each person ranks their metro against their own criteria and shortlists ten firms.
Step 3. Spend the 10 free unlocks. Argue about which companies deserve them. That argument is the point of the exercise, and it's the one a real searcher has with investors every month.
Step 4. Benchmark each shortlisted loan with the deal benchmark tool. Across 16,487 manufacturing borrowers the median peak loan is $558,000, the 25th percentile $300,000, the 75th $1,140,000, and 30% cleared $1M. A firm borrowing well above its state median is a different animal from one at the 25th, and the room should say why.
Debrief. Each person presents one company and one reason a public record proved them wrong about it. Ohio has 110 loans due in 2026 and 131 in 2032, with a trough of 91 in 2029, so nobody hides behind urgency.
Scouly is not a marketplace and not a broker. Nothing on it is for sale, no owner has agreed to anything, it never contacts owners, and it never estimates revenue or EBITDA because no public source reports either. If a club exercise ends with somebody cold-calling an Ohio machine shop, that was your club's decision. Coverage is the other caveat: seven verticals, 51 US state pages covering all 50 states plus DC, and 15 UK metros. If your thesis is car washes or pharmacies, Scouly has nothing for you today.
Students arrive at ETA from two directions and the sourcing math differs for each. Start with search fund vs self-funded search, then the pages for self-funded searchers and search funds.
Is Scouly free for students? Yes. The Explorer tier is free with no card and includes browsing all 173,769 tracked companies plus 10 full profile unlocks with the source records attached. There is no separate student plan because Explorer already covers a term project. Paid Operator runs $35 a month with unlimited unlocks, and it exists for people running a live search.
Can I use Scouly's data in a class paper or thesis? The SBA maturity wall dataset at scouly.com/data is released under CC0, which puts it in the public domain. Use it in a paper, a dissertation, a club deck or a commercial product, with attribution optional. The underlying SBA 7(a)/504 and PPP files are US government records and are public domain in their own right.
What is a good ETA club exercise using public data? Pick one vertical in one state with enough depth to support a full room. Ohio manufacturing works because Scouly tracks 2,819 companies there and the file holds 959 Ohio manufacturing SBA loans. Have members write a thesis first, then rank a metro, then spend their free unlocks and defend the picks against the national loan distribution.
How do I get a regional data cut for my club? Six CSVs are already published at scouly.com/data: the national maturity file plus southeast, midwest, northeast, west and south central. If you need something narrower, a single metro, a single vertical, or a custom set of states, email nishkal.dachepelly@gmail.com describing the cut and I'll generate the file for you.
Does Scouly tell me which businesses are for sale? No. Nothing on Scouly is listed for sale and no owner has been contacted. The score ranks companies by how visible a transition question is in the public record. The inputs are loan maturity, registry longevity and local fragmentation. Treat it as a screening tool that tells you where to start reading, and expect most owners to say no.