Take Five #171: SBA weekly roundup with updates on grants, free trainings, and more
Top five must-reads this week in the world of SMB acquisitions and operations
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Take Five #171: SBA weekly roundup with updates on grants, free trainings, and more
1. SBA weekly roundup with updates on grants, free trainings, how to take advantage of them
2. 💥 Event: 2025 Buy Then Build Summit | Sept 24-26
When: September 24-26, 2025
Where: St. Louis, Missouri
Head to St. Louis for this three-day ETA event featuring in-depth sessions and workshops such as “Preferred Buyer Status: How to Earn It,” “Post-Close Lessons They Don’t Teach in Diligence,” and “Financial Fluency for Acquisition Entrepreneurs.” Speakers include Walker Deibel, Tim Ericson, Chelsea Wood, and Kumo’s Jason Pratts, sharing practical insights for acquisition-focused entrepreneurs.
Find event details and buy tickets here.
3. Pipeline velocity formula tracks deal flow and can reveal what’s slowing you down
Pipeline velocity measures how quickly deals move through your acquisition process. Think of it as a snapshot of your pipeline's overall efficiency - it highlights potential bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
The formula for pipeline velocity is: (Opportunities × Average Deal Size × Win Rate) ÷ Sales Cycle Length. For instance, with 10 opportunities, each worth $500,000, a 30% win rate, and a 90-day sales cycle, your velocity would be about $16,667 per day.
Instead of looking at this metric as a one-time figure, track trends over time. A drop in velocity could point to issues like poor lead quality, pricing missteps, or inefficiencies in due diligence. Companies that closely monitor sales cycles often see revenue growth of up to 18%.
To improve your velocity, refine your acquisition criteria to focus on high-quality leads. Tools and platforms that streamline research and communication can also minimize delays caused by administrative tasks.
Conversion Rates by Pipeline Stage
Once you’ve evaluated pipeline velocity, it’s important to understand where deals are getting stuck. Conversion rates help identify the exact stages where opportunities stall. By tracking the percentage of deals that move from one stage to the next, you can pinpoint and address problem areas.
For SMB buyers, common pipeline stages include initial screening, financial review, management meetings, due diligence, and final negotiations. According to RevOps Squared, the median conversion rate from marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads is 20%.
Monitoring these rates can reveal where improvements are needed. For example, if deals often stall between financial review and management meetings, it might signal issues with your financial analysis or misaligned seller expectations. Businesses that track these stages effectively can reduce their sales cycles by up to 15%.
4. 👀 Older service biz owners eyeing the exit, open doors for Millennials and Gen Z
5. Acquiring Minds Interview: “Buying a $200m Franchisor (Not Units, the Whole System)”
When today's guests set out to buy a business, they first systematically developed a thesis.
Both with private equity backgrounds, brothers Tyler and Zach Gordon combed through lists of industries, looking for ones with great fundamentals but not yet on Private Equity's radar.
The process led them to a franchise system of thrift stores.
At first Tyler & Zach thought they'd be franchisees, buying a platform of existing units and building from there.
But the subject of today's interview is how our heroes ended up buying not units in the system, but the system itself.
So this is a story, our first, of buying a franchisor, a system with about 200 thrift stores that collectively generated about $200m in sales when Tyler and Zach bought it.
Find the Acquiring Minds article and podcast episode here.
📢 Product Release Update
New in Kumo: Your Deal Pipeline is Here
We’ve just launched a powerful new way to organize your acquisition search inside Kumo — the Deal Pipeline. Now, when you favorite a deal, it automatically moves into your Interested tab, giving you a central place to track the opportunities that matter most. From there, you can easily move deals through each stage of your journey:
Info Requested – you’ve reached out to the broker.
NDA/CIM Received – documents in hand.
Deal Analysis – crunch the numbers.
Banker Connected – financing conversations underway.
LOI Submitted → Diligence → Close – keep momentum all the way to the finish line.
Think of it as CRM-lite for dealmakers — streamlined enough to be simple, powerful enough to keep your search on track.
Coming soon:
Add your own proprietary deals to Kumo
Upload documents to a built-in deal data room
Organize notes, messaging, and sources & uses
Quick-pencil deal structuring + LOI Builder
We’re just getting started, and we’d love your feedback.
Jump into your account, try the new pipeline, and tell us what you think.
Loved what you read? Subscribe to Take Five to get our top quick reads every week from the team at Kumo. Kumo aggregates thousands of sources into one easy-to-use platform so that you can spend less time sourcing, and more time closing deals.