Closing Wealth Gaps Through Small Biz Acquisition

With 12 million businesses for sale in the next 25 years, now is the time for underrepresented individuals to own small businesses and build generational wealth. Many programs provide small business technical assistance and support with creating a startup, but there are no national programs like New Majority Capital Foundation’s bETA accelerator for underrepresented entrepreneurs to learn how to buy and scale an existing small business. 

Our mission is to build the path to economic mobility and wealth creation through “Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition”. This process of ETA is a highly successful but often unknown path to entrepreneurship where an individual buys and scales an existing small business instead of building a startup from scratch. NMCF has developed a proprietary training curriculum with the faculty from Babson College who are responsible for the development of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Initiative. Our scalable adult learning curriculum is effective in training our fellows in the full process of acquisition from sourcing to vetting, building the necessary capital stack to closing. We have successfully completed 6 accelerator programs in 4 cities (New York, DC, Providence and Atlanta) and have plans to reach additional cities in 2025 including Houston, the Twin Cities, Los Angeles and Charlotte. We have graduated 193 entrepreneurs to date and continue to provide resources to our alumni to enable their ability to buy small businesses. We've also established a pipeline of over 800 entrepreneurs nationwide and we've unlocked $80 million of capital -- SBA loans, equity and other financing -- for business acquisitions. We seek to bring this opportunity to underserved entrepreneurs across the country.

With funding from the ICC, we aim to provide 2-4 focus group incentive payments to acquirers that successfully complete the bETA accelerator and are advancing in their journey towards ownership. We would use the funds to offer direct payments to alumni who completed an accelerator in the Fall of 2024 and who have secured a counter-signed agreement with a seller and a bank term sheet to make their acquisition, proving that they are serious about a specific deal.

In less than 2 years since we launched the bETA accelerator, our alumni have acquired 13 businesses, with active deals among 40 other potential acquirers. We aim to continue increasing the success of our alumni through a few adjustments to the program in 2025 including an updated vetting process, stronger 1:1 mentorship, access to deal analysts and other experts for deal review, improved curricular offerings, improved ecosystem access, pre-acquisition loans, and ongoing alumni support. Acquisition typically takes 18-24 months, and we are working to shorten this effort and speed the success for our alumni. Our focus group payments are one approach to encourage the momentum around the search process by providing tangible benefits to those who make immediate progress in their acquisition, post program.