How To Buy A Business for $0 Out Of Pocket (Step by step)

**Brian Luebben** (0:00)
Yes, you actually can buy a million-dollar business for zero dollars down out of your own pocket. And in this video, I'm going to show you the exact way normal people are quietly buying these businesses without having personal bags of money laying around. Because over the last few years, buying businesses has completely changed my life. It allowed me to leave corporate America, move to Europe for six months out of the year, and build an eight-figure portfolio of companies before turning 32 years old. We've also casually bought about $100 million of small businesses in our community, Action Academy, across many, many other people. So, it works. But, there is a massive, massive misunderstanding online right now because the internet has convinced people that if you have zero savings, zero experience, and zero financial discipline, you should somehow go buy a million-dollar business with no money. And honestly, I think that that's terrible advice. So in this video, I want to break down the two real ways people buy businesses with zero dollars out of pocket. While I think one path is dramatically smarter than the other, the exact amount of money I think you should have saved before buying your first business, and also how I would personally structure this if it was my first acquisition that I was starting over from scratch today. So first things first, why is business buying such a huge opportunity here in 2026?
Most people have absolutely no idea that this world even exists. They think that the only way to become wealthy is start a company from scratch, buy a real property per year, or maybe spend 20 years climbing the corporate ladder. Meanwhile, every single year in America, hundreds of thousands of profitable small businesses are quietly getting sold. Plumbing companies, HVAC, car washes, accounting firms, service businesses, logistics, real businesses are already making money with employees and customers. And most of the owners selling these businesses aren't retiring because the business failed. They're retiring because they are old. And this is what people are calling the silver tsunami. Millions of baby boomers own businesses right now, and a huge percentage of them have nobody to pass the business down to, which creates one of the greatest wealth opportunities of our generation. The craziest part is most people never hear about this path because the internet is obsessed with startups, side hustles, and everything that's sexy and fast. But, boring cash flowing businesses quietly create most of the millionaires that you see today across America. And for easy math today, we are going to be talking about buying a $1 million purchase price business, which would typically do around $300,000 of profit and kick you off a nice, crispy $100,000 to you personally in cash flow take home per year. Pretty sick, right? Now, how do you buy that for $0?
Let's get to it. The first way people buy businesses for $0 is the version that the internet loves talking about, 100% seller financing. This is also called creative financing, which basically means that the seller becomes the bank. Instead of you bringing 10% down payment and getting a bank loan, the seller agrees to let you pay for the business over time, directly to them using the profits from the business itself. And yes, technically this absolutely can happen. I've seen it happen. I've helped it happen. I have elements of seller financing in just about every single business deal I do. I even did a business deal, 90% seller finance for $900,000. Here's the part nobody online seems to talk about. These deals are typically much harder than they sound. Because if I'm a seller and I spent 20 years building my company from scratch, why would I hand it over to somebody with no money, no experience and no proof that you can actually operate the business? That's the part the gurus conveniently skip when they're trying to tell you if you have $0 or debt, that you can go creatively finance a small business. So while 100% seller financing absolutely exists, there are usually unique situations, distressed situations, highly negotiated, involve extremely sophisticated buyers. There are so many things that can go wrong, typically like 5 to 10 times more risks and red flags. If you're doing a off market or seller finance deal where you're no broker, nobody in between, it's just you and the seller talking directly, probably not their first rodeo, but sure as hell is yours. They are going to take you to town. OK, not that great. Am I saying is it impossible? No, but I'm assuming that you're watching YouTube videos and business buying because you want to buy a small business without doing this crazy wacky thing called bankrupting your family. So entrepreneurship is calculated risk. It's asymmetric risk. Asymmetric risk means that we want to minimize the downside as much as possible while having an unlimited upside. So it's like thinking about having a house with a very solid basement floor, but no ceiling. It'd be a terrible house to live in. But for the analogy, it works. We want to make as much money as humanly possible. And if we do mess up, which you will, minimize the consequences of that happening, right? So unless you have a strong background in creative finance and real estate investing, I absolutely do not recommend this path to most people looking to buy your first business. Zero percent. Just because something's possible does not mean it's the best strategy. And at the end of the day, the next strategy that I'm actually going to recommend is a little bit slower, but it is much, much safer. Kind of goes hand in hand. And that is going to be that the next path, that I actually do recommend to buy a business for $0 down out of your personal pocket, is much slower, but it's much safer. So much safer. Because why would you leave a job that is already giving you income and predictable to go in and buy in a small business? Like there's already a lot of predictability running a business. So why would you do that same thing in negotiating a business? So just because something is possible does not mean it's the best strategy, even if you see a million YouTube videos on it. Don't worry because the next strategy is significantly safer. All those slower, but this is the one I would 100% recommend. It's the one that I've done many times and it's the one that I have helped hundreds of people personally do. Let's get to it. When you remove the internet nonsense and you actually enter the real world, this is the path that most real, normal acquisition entrepreneurs use every single day. Let's say you find a really solid business, maybe one to three million dollars. Maybe it's an HVAC or a plumbing company, any boring service business with strong cash flow, right? So instead of trying to creatively hack the deal, you buy the business using an SBA loan, which is essentially, think about it, like a mortgage on the business. So this means that a bank funds the majority of your purchase price, usually around 90%.