About The Closing Binder
What this is
The Closing Binder is about buying a small business, told through the financing. Most writing on acquisitions is written from the seller's side or the lender's; this site is written from the buyer's chair, by someone sitting in it. It offers three things:
- Free deal tools that model a purchase under the actual SOP rules: price, seller note, equity injection, DSCR, and what you keep after taxes.
- Lender rankings and market data computed from the federal 7(a) loan file: who actually funds acquisitions, at what sizes, at what rates.
- Plain-English coverage of the rules as they change, alongside essays and data studies on buying a business with SBA financing.
What this is not
Nothing here is individualized financial, legal, or tax advice; it is process documentation and education, and your own advisors should look at your own deal. Every tool and every article here is free to read and use. And if lender referral relationships ever exist, they will be spelled out on the disclosure page; today there are none.
Who runs it
The Closing Binder is operated by Ground Plane Studio, LLC.
Why trust it
Three reasons, all checkable. The numbers come from the federal loan file, computed under a public methodology that states its sources, definitions, and limits. The rules coverage is read from the SOP documents themselves, not from secondhand summaries. And it is all published in the open, with sources you can check, where being wrong in public is expensive enough to keep us careful.