ENTREPRENEURSHIPWeeks to result

The "Four A" Club

Accountant, attorney, real estate agent, financial adviser — the four people who already know who wants to sell.

Problem it solves

Accountant, attorney, real estate agent, financial adviser — the four people who already know who wants to sell.

Best for

Buyers with no proprietary deal flow who need off-market small businesses before they hit a broker listing.

Not ideal for

Buyers in markets where businesses transact primarily through public listings and intermediaries.

Overview

Why this framework exists

A deal-origination heuristic: the four professionals who advise small-business owners — accountant, attorney, real estate agent and financial adviser — learn about a coming sale long before any broker does. Cultivating those four relationships in a local market surfaces off-market deals. Sanchez pairs it with the observation that roughly 90% of homes sell through online advertising while only about 20% of businesses do, so the business market stays relationship-mediated.

Core principles

3 total
  1. The owner's advisers know about the sale before the market does
  2. Business deal flow is relationship-mediated, not listing-mediated
  3. Off-market deals face less competitive bidding

Checklist

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Origin story

How this framework came to be

Written up in Sanchez's own Entrepreneur byline (March 2025) as the first of five lead-generation methods she used going from one laundromat to a portfolio of 24 Main Street businesses.

Source

Traced to primary
Source · ESSAY
I Turned One Business Into 24, Making Tens of Millions — Here's How You Can, Too
Codie Sanchez · 2025
Open source →