Transforming Main Street M&A

How Sundance Financial is solving the business brokerage crisis.

Small business ownership is hard. From managing employees to balancing cash flow, the challenges that their proprietors face never end. But perhaps no challenge looms larger than the ultimate transition: selling the business that represents not just their livelihood, but also often their life’s work.

Every year, countless numbers of small business owners quietly face the same dilemma: they want to retire, step back, or move on. For most owners, this sale will be the largest financial transaction of their lives, often representing 80% of their net worth. And yet, the vast majority find themselves woefully unprepared to navigate this complex process alone.

Unlike homeowners, who can turn to a mature network of real estate brokers, small business owners face limited access to qualified brokers, steep commissions, and a marketplace that can be described as opaque at best and predatory at worst. 

For Edouard Lyndt (HBS ’25), founder of Sundance Financial, that imbalance is more than just a market flaw; it is an opportunity to reinvent how “Main Street” businesses change hands.

A Broken Market

For many small business owners working with business brokers, selling the company they have built is confusing, costly, and often disappointing. “Main Street” businesses (loosely defined as those generating <$5 million in revenue) typically see commissions running as high as 8-15%, and too often, the broker’s incentive is simply to push the deal through at any price. What should be a proud milestone can instead feel like a rushed, impersonal transaction.  

Business brokers — the intermediaries who guide business owners through the selling process, connect them with buyers, and manage negotiations — are supposed to make the process easier. But in practice, many owners describe the opposite experience. 

A quick scan of online forums and seller communities reveals the depth of dissatisfaction:

• “Brokers are the worst — at least the 29 of them I’ve interacted with. None of them come from finance, and multiples are pulled from the magic hat.”

• “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’ ‘negotiation’ skills are horrible. They all think they can negotiate, but I have never seen a broker … who can honestly negotiate with skill.”

• “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 are not isolated complaints. Together, they paint the picture of an industry plagued by misaligned incentives and systemic dysfunction, leaving millions of small business owners exposed at the very moment they can least afford it.

The Roots of Dysfunction

Behind these frustrations lies a deeper structural problem: the sheer mismatch between the number of small business owners who need help and the limited pool of qualified brokers available to serve them. 

Only 3,000 to 4,000 business brokers serve 33 million small businesses nationwide. The imbalance is set to worsen as Baby Boomer founders retire, with more than 12 million of these businesses expected to change hands over the next 10 to 15 years. This supply and demand discrepancy drives commissions upwards, resulting in average commissions that have ballooned to 8-15%, approximately five times the typical commission rate for real estate transactions.

Economics also tilt the industry away from smaller transactions. Selling a $10 million business might only take three times more effort to sell than a $1 million business but generates up to 10 times the success fee. Unsurprisingly, sophisticated dealmakers tend to move upmarket to larger, more lucrative transactions, leaving the “Main Street” segment structurally underserved. 

Exacerbating the issue is the lack of regulation in small business M&A. 32 states carry no qualifications or requirements to operate a business brokerage, with the majority of remaining states requiring only a real estate license. As a result, many small business owners find themselves relying on intermediaries with limited M&A or finance experience to advise them on what is often the most consequential deal of their lives.

A Personal Mission

For Lyndt, these market failures are not abstract problems; they are personal. Having grown up in a small business family, he witnessed firsthand the challenges owners face when transitioning their life’s work. This experience, combined with a decade at the intersection of small business and finance — advising sellers and buyers on transactions worth hundreds of millions, as well as sitting on the other side of the table as a private equity investor — gave him both the motivation and expertise to tackle this broken system.

At HBS, while many of his classmates explored entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA) as a path to ownership, Lyndt became more interested in fixing the infrastructure that made small business acquisitions so difficult in the first place. His vision was to build a new kind of brokerage — one that blends the empathy and trust of a human advisor with the efficiency of AI and modern technology. 

The Sundance Solution

Sundance Financial seeks to address the business brokerage industry’s challenges through three core innovations:

• Institutional deal discipline. Sundance brings the valuation frameworks, structured transaction processes, and comprehensive buyer-seller preparation typically reserved for larger M&A deals to Main Street business transactions. This includes rigorous financial analysis, market-based pricing models, and systematic deal execution.

• Buyer-informed deal strategy. Having spent years evaluating and acquiring businesses, Sundance’s team understands what buyers look for in a business. This buy-side perspective allows them to position businesses strategically, anticipate buyer concerns, and structure deals that attract premium offers rather than just any offers.

• Superior service enabled by technology. By leveraging AI and modern technology to automate administrative processes and document preparation, Sundance frees human professionals to focus on what matters most: managing relationships and navigating the complex personal dynamics inherent in business sales. This reduction in operational overhead allows Sundance to serve more clients at lower cost while improving service quality.

Lyndt recognizes that technology alone will not solve the problem in Main Street business brokerage. “Selling a business is as much a personal challenge as a procedural one,” he notes. “The human element — understanding a seller’s emotional journey, building trust with buyers, navigating complex negotiations — will always require experienced professionals.”

In particular, Lyndt understands the wariness surrounding the unsafeguarded use of AI in business. “Business owners have spent decades building relationships and dealing with people,” he explains. “The last thing they want is a robot handling the most important transaction of their lives.”

That is why Sundance Financial takes a deliberately human-first approach, using AI not to replace professionals but to amplify their capabilities. The platform represents what Y Combinator calls a “full-stack AI company” — one that combines technology with human expertise to rebuild an industry from the ground up. “Our job is to give those professionals better tools and processes, to enable them to scale their impact,” says Lyndt.

A New Standard for Main Street

Sundance Financial’s mission extends beyond fixing a broken brokerage model. It aims to ensure that every business owner, regardless of company size, can access high-quality representation at a reasonable cost. In a market where business sales often represent generational wealth transfers, Sundance seeks to provide economic justice for the entrepreneurs who drive America’s economy.

Katerina Gan (MBA ’27) is originally from Riverside, California. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Economics. Prior to HBS, she worked at Linden Capital Partners, a healthcare private equity firm based in Chicago.