Methodology

How Mainferret works — and what it can't tell you.

We built Mainferret on a simple conviction: the best acquisition decisions come from evidence, not anecdotes. Here's exactly where our data comes from, how we score it, and — just as important — its limits. We'd rather you trust us because we showed our work.

The data

• SBA 7(a) & 504 loan records (FOIA), FY1991–FY2026 — 2,174,502 loans, $742.8B in gross approvals. The official public loan-level record from the U.S. Small Business Administration (data.sba.gov): borrower name, mailing address, NAICS industry, loan amount, approval date, maturity, jobs supported, franchise flag, and loan status (paid-in-full, active, or charged-off). Every headline figure on this site is computed directly from that record. Nothing in the current score is scraped, purchased, or modeled from third-party data.
• Enrichment sources (used in concierge engagements, not in the score): Google Places, state registrations and licensing, litigation, and news. These verify specific targets after the record surfaces them.

The record has no stable business ID, so we roll loans up to businesses by normalized borrower name, state, and ZIP. That yields 1,643,950 distinct businesses. Name changes and relocations will split or merge some of them — matching is probabilistic, and we say so.

The succession signal

The core insight: an owner's tenure is the strongest public predictor of seller-readiness. Owners are typically 35–50 at their first SBA loan, so someone who borrowed 15–30 years ago is plausibly 55–75 today — often having bought the business with that very loan. We compute tenure from loan vintage and rank owners by how likely they are to be ready for a conversation, long before they ever list with a broker.

Sell-readiness score (v0)

The current scorer is a transparent, weighted heuristic — version zero, and we label it that way. Six signals, all computed from the loan record, sum to a 0–100 score:

• Owner tenure — weight 35. Years since the first SBA loan. The dominant factor: a proxy for owner age and retirement horizon.
• Debt runway — weight 25. Scheduled final loan maturity recently passed or within about two years. A debt-free business is a cleaner sale, and owners often wait out their note.
• Loan outcome — weight 15. All loans paid in full: the business survived and deleveraged.
• Independence — weight 10. Non-franchise. Independent owners have no franchisor resale channel — the succession gap is theirs.
• Quiet period — weight 10. No new SBA borrowing in 7+ years: no visible expansion reinvestment.
• Size band — weight 5. Lender-reported jobs supported of 5–50, the classic SMB-buyer sweet spot.

Hard exclusions: any distressed loan (charge-off, liquidation, delinquency, deferment), or a business first financed less than four years ago. A "prospect" is a surviving business scoring 90 or above — the bar where long tenure and a live debt-maturity window coincide. On the current build that's 133,874 businesses (8.1% of all businesses in the record), holding $77.2B of SBA-financed capital. None of them are listed for sale anywhere.

Known v0 limits, stated plainly: founding year is proxied by the first SBA loan (the business may be older); scheduled maturity ignores refis and prepayments except where a paid-in-full date exists; "jobs supported" is a lender estimate at approval; and none of this observes owner intent. The score tells you where to look. Verifying a specific owner is the concierge work.

Risk & survival intelligence

Because the record carries the final status of millions of loans, we can measure realized charge-off (default) rates by industry and business profile — so you can tell a durable trade from a landmine before you spend a dollar. These rates are computed from resolved loans in the same FOIA record, and every report states the cohort they come from.

The buy-vs-build numbers

The headline stat on the site (acquisitions charge off at 5.4% vs 14.6% for startups) is computed as follows.

• Population. Loans whose SBA BusinessAge field uses the modern four categories: change of ownership, existing 2+ years, new 2 years or less, and startup. That's 594,666 loans. SBA adopted these labels broadly around FY2018 and partially back to FY2004, so this population skews to recent vintages. Older vintages use a different age vocabulary with no acquisition category and can't answer buy vs build.
• Exclusions. Cancelled loans never disbursed, and still-active loans are too young to judge. Both are excluded. That leaves 192,491 resolved loans (paid in full or charged off).
• Rate. Charged-off loans divided by resolved loans, per category. Charged-off means an SBA charge-off status or a charge-off date on record.
• Robustness. Restricting to seasoned cohorts (approved FY2021 or earlier) gives 5.7% vs 14.8% on the same basis, or 2.9% vs 12.2% counting charge-offs over all disbursed loans. The levels move with the slice. The ranking never does: acquisitions are the safest category and startups the riskiest in every cut.
• Caveats. BusinessAge is lender-reported at application and unaudited. The "new, 2 years or less" category is small and young, so its rate is the least stable of the four. Resolved-only rates run high in young cohorts because failures resolve faster than payoffs.

What this is not

• Not financial, legal, or tax advice. Mainferret is research tooling. Verify every figure with your CPA, attorney, and lender before acting.
• Not a valuation. Scores estimate seller-readiness and relative risk — not what a specific business is worth. That requires real diligence on real financials.
• Not perfect matching. Linking SBA records to a live business by name and location is probabilistic; we show provenance and confidence, and we expect you to confirm before outreach.
• Public data only. We surface what is already public record. We don't expose anything a seller hasn't already disclosed to the government.

Sources

U.S. SBA 7(a) & 504 FOIA datasets (data.sba.gov), files as of March 31, 2026 — the source of every figure on this site. Enrichment for concierge work: Google Places API, state registration and licensing records, and publicly available web and court records. SBA refreshes the FOIA files quarterly and we rebuild on each refresh.