Last updated: August 2026
You are buying one company, with your own savings and a bank loan, and you are the person who shows up to run it on Monday. A fund's sourcing problem is a database of millions and a team to work it. Yours is a ranked shortlist of owners in the two counties you would actually move to, with the public evidence behind each name.
Scouly builds that list. It tracks 173,769 companies across seven verticals from public records and scores each one on how close the owner looks to a transition. You send the letter yourself.
A self-funded searcher pays for the search out of pocket and finances the purchase mostly with debt. The SBA 7(a) program caps a loan at $5 million and lists change of ownership as an approved use, which puts a hard ceiling on the deal. On Acquiring Minds, Jordan Carter puts the usual band at $3 million to $8 million of enterprise value, and plenty of first deals close below it.
The funded model runs on other math. Stanford's 2026 study of over 850 core search funds in the US and Canada reports a $16 million median purchase price for firms acquired in 2024 and 2025. If you are still choosing between the two, read search fund vs self-funded search and then using an SBA 7(a) loan to buy a business.
Every listing site is an auction with the timer already running. A broker writes a teaser, sends it to the whole buyer list at once, and your offer lands next to offers from people carrying more capital and no personal guarantee. You compete on price and certainty, the two things a first-time buyer has least of.
Proprietary flow removes the auction and hands you a harder job. Nobody publishes a list of owners who are thinking about it and have not called anyone. You build that list out of public records, then write to strangers. Our guide on how to find off-market businesses walks the manual version.
Write the thesis first. Geography, vertical, business age, size band, whatever else you care about. The thesis builder is free, and how to write an acquisition thesis covers what belongs in it.
Work a ranked list. Every tracked company gets a deterministic 0 to 100 score built from SBA 7(a) and 504 loan maturity, registry longevity, and local market fragmentation. Same inputs, same score, every time. No black box.
Read the records behind the score. Each profile links its evidence: the SBA loan and its approval date, the registry filing, the Form 5500 or PPP record if there is one. Check the work before you spend a stamp.
Send your own letters. Scouly drafts outreach against the record it has, you edit it, you send it. Scouly never contacts an owner for you, which matters when the advantage is a letter from a real person who wants to run the business.
Free Explorer gives you 10 full profile unlocks. Operator is $35 a month for unlimited unlocks and unlimited outreach drafts.
Two verticals that fit an SBA-financed first deal, with the states carrying the most tracked companies:
HVAC and plumbing, 20,259 US companies tracked:
Auto repair, 23,078 US companies tracked:
None of those is a listing. Each is a company with a verifiable public-record footprint. Manufacturing is the deepest vertical Scouly tracks with 45,096 US companies, and dental follows at 26,563. Landscaping, funeral homes and veterinary fill out the seven, all browsable from the Markets index.
Public data does not report sale prices. It reports what banks lent, a defensible floor. Across the SBA 7(a) and 504 FOIA files, Scouly counts 6,366 HVAC and plumbing borrowers with a $380,000 median peak loan and a $774,000 75th percentile. Auto repair has 16,262 borrowers, a $404,000 median and a $738,000 75th percentile. Roughly a fifth of HVAC borrowers and a sixth of auto repair borrowers crossed $1 million.
Those are loan amounts and nothing more. Drop a number into the deal benchmark tool to place a loan or an asking price against the quartiles for its vertical and state.
Scouly will never estimate a company's revenue or EBITDA. No public source supports it, and a made-up number would poison your first call. Size evidence sits on the profile and adds zero points to the score.
Coverage varies by state. Registry quality is uneven and SBA borrowing is thicker in some states than others. A metro with 12 tracked companies really does mean 12.
Scouly is also not a marketplace and not a broker. Nothing on it is for sale and no owner has agreed to talk to you. A high score says the public record looks like a transition window, and plenty of those owners will still tell you no. That is the trade for reaching them first.
Start with a free thesis, or read how the data is assembled first.
What is a self-funded searcher? Someone buying a single business with their own money plus debt, usually an SBA 7(a) loan, who plans to operate the company personally. They pay their own search costs with no investor salary, sign a personal guarantee, and keep most of the equity. Acquiring Minds cites SIG searchers averaging 73% common equity ownership, against 10% or less for a traditional searcher at close.
How do I find off-market businesses to buy with an SBA loan? Work backward from the loan records. The SBA publishes borrower-level 7(a) and 504 data in its FOIA files, showing which companies a bank already underwrote and when. Pair that with registry age and local fragmentation, rank the list, then write to owners directly. Scouly automates that.
Is Scouly free for self-funded searchers? Yes, to a point. The Explorer tier is free and includes 10 full profile unlocks, enough to test whether the data covers your metro and vertical. Operator is $35 a month with unlimited unlocks. Building a thesis and browsing market counts costs nothing.
Does Scouly estimate a business's revenue or EBITDA? No, and it never will. Public records do not support an earnings estimate for a private company, so any tool producing one is guessing. Scouly shows what the records say: loan sizes, approval and maturity dates, registry filings, and the payroll and headcount evidence in PPP and Form 5500 records. The financials come out of your conversation with the owner, under an NDA.
How is this different from BizBuySell for a self-funded search? BizBuySell shows businesses whose owners already hired a broker and agreed to a public process. Scouly shows companies that have never been listed, ranked by public evidence of an approaching owner transition. You can work both at once. The full comparison is at Scouly vs BizBuySell.