How Sundance Financial brings institutional rigor, buyer insight, and modern technology to the business brokerage industry.
Small-business ownership is hard. But selling that business can often be harder.
For millions of owners approaching retirement or transition, the sale of their company represents not just a financial event but the transfer of their life’s work — often the largest transaction they will ever complete.
Yet the system they rely on is stacked against them.
The Business Broker Industry: A System Under Strain
Business brokers exist to guide owners through this critical transition. In theory, they bring expertise in valuation, marketing, negotiation, and deal structuring — services that should make complex sales manageable.
In practice, the industry operates with little standardization and even less oversight.
Only 3,000–4,000 active business brokers serve 33 million small businesses nationwide. That structural imbalance has created a seller’s dilemma: high demand, limited supply, and inconsistent quality.
32 states require no formal qualifications to operate as a business broker. Many practitioners enter the field without training in finance, valuation, due diligence, or negotiation. Commission structures routinely exceed 10%, yet service quality varies dramatically.
The result is a market where sellers often discover — too late — that the professionals they’ve entrusted with their life’s work are underqualified, underincentivized, or simply unprepared.
With more than 12 million small businesses expected to change hands over the next decade, this misalignment threatens to become a full-scale crisis.
For Edouard Lyndt, founder of Sundance Financial, these aren’t isolated pain points. They’re symptoms of a structural failure — one that demands a fundamental reimagining of how Main Street businesses are prepared, positioned, and sold.
The Seller’s Frustration: A Market Defined by Dysfunction
The complaints from business owners are consistent and damning:
“I’m convinced that the brokers are the weakest point in selling a business. They don’t help sellers price accordingly … [or] make sure that they have the documentation that is going to be needed to close the sale.”
“Brokers make the process harder than it needs to be: no transparency, no numbers, no logic in their process.”
“[Sellers] think the broker is out there ‘working for them,’ but in reality, a lot of brokers are gatekeeping information, pushing unqualified buyers away, and sabotaging deals without even realizing it.”
These frustrations reveal a deeper truth: the traditional brokerage model is built on improvisation, not process. Many brokers rely on intuition rather than data, ad-hoc communication rather than structured timelines, and generic marketing materials rather than thoughtful positioning.
Sundance Financial was built to change that.
Three Pillars of a New Approach
Sundance’s model rests on three interconnected principles designed to bring clarity, discipline, and buyer-focused insight to an industry that has long operated without them.
- Institutional Rigor: Wall Street Discipline for Main Street Transactions
Where traditional brokers lean on guesswork and outdated rules of thumb, Sundance applies the structured processes that leading investment banks use to conduct sales of businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
This means rigorous financial normalization rooted in deep business finance expertise, defensible valuation methodologies grounded in actual market data, and structured preparation plans that cover documentation, marketing materials, and diligence-readiness before a business ever goes to market.
It also means clear timelines, consistent touchpoints, and deal governance — not sporadic updates and reactive firefighting.
“Owners deserve more than a generic CIM and a buyer blast list,” Lyndt explains. “They deserve a process that supports transparency and education.”
For Main Street business owners accustomed to chaos and uncertainty, this institutional discipline is transformative. It replaces emotion and improvisation with structure and confidence.
- Buyer Insight: Understanding What Actually Moves Deals Forward
Sundance brings an advantage few brokers possess: extensive buy-side experience. Having evaluated, priced, and acquired businesses as an institutional buyer, Lyndt knows exactly what buyers scrutinize — and how easily small missteps can derail deals.
This perspective shapes everything: which valuation drivers genuinely matter to buyers, what diligence questions arise first, how buyers assess risk and financial integrity, which narratives increase perceived value, and how to preempt objections before they surface.
“Most deals fall apart not because of the price,” Lyndt notes, “but because sellers enter the market unprepared for how buyers think.”
By anticipating buyer concerns and incorporating them into the preparation process from day one, Sundance increases deal certainty, improves valuation outcomes, and reduces friction throughout the transaction.
- Technology Forward: Modernizing a Sector Stuck in the Past
Main Street brokerage remains largely manual — a reality that creates inefficiency, errors, and unnecessary cost. Sundance’s technology-forward approach automates repetitive, error-prone tasks, enabling faster timelines, cleaner materials, and greater transparency for owners.
But Sundance’s philosophy is deliberately human-first.
“Selling a business is as much a personal challenge as a procedural one,” Lyndt observes. “Technology can analyze numbers, but it can’t manage seller anxiety, navigate interpersonal dynamics, or negotiate a complicated deal.”
Sundance combines human expertise with modern automation — human judgment on the critical decisions, technology handling the repetitive work. This hybrid approach allows Sundance to serve more owners, with higher quality and at lower cost — directly addressing an industry that has long priced out too many sellers.
A New Standard for Main Street M&A
Sundance isn’t attempting to polish a flawed system. It’s rebuilding from first principles.
Institutional rigor ensures small-business sellers receive the same professionalism and discipline afforded to larger corporate transactions. Buyer insight aligns every step of the process with what actually drives deals forward. Technology-forward execution eliminates the bottlenecks that have plagued the industry for decades.
Together, these pillars create something the Main Street M&A market has rarely seen: predictability, transparency, and genuine support for owners navigating one of the most consequential transitions of their lives.
The stakes are too high for anything less. Over the next decade, millions of small-business owners will face the same choice: trust an outdated system built on improvisation, or work with advisors who bring structure, insight, and modern tools to the table.
“Every small-business owner deserves high-quality representation,” Lyndt says. “Our job is to bring the right expertise, apply the right tools, and provide the support that turns the sale of their life’s work into the success it should be.”
For business owners ready for a different approach, Sundance Financial represents more than an alternative. It’s a new standard.
For more information on how they can help, visit Sundance Financial’s website or connect with Edouard Lyndt on LinkedIn.
