The Most Underrated Skill in Buying a Business: Being Coachable
By Chad Peterson, Founder of Peterson Acquisitions
From Dreaming to Owning a Business
I’ve watched a lot of people try to buy a business. Some of them had money. Some of them had degrees. Some of them had years of corporate experience and a resume that made them look like the obvious choice to run anything.
And plenty of them never bought a thing.
Then I’d watch someone else come along less capital, less polish, fewer credentials and they’d close a great deal, step into ownership, and start building real wealth. Year after year, the same pattern. So eventually I had to ask the obvious question: what’s the difference?
It isn’t IQ. It isn’t net worth. It isn’t even hustle, though that matters.
The difference is almost always attitude and approach. The winners are coachable. The ones who stall out are not.
I want to spend this whole piece on that one idea, because I’m convinced it’s the most underrated skill in this entire business. Being coachable isn’t a soft, feel-good extra. It’s the thing that gets you financed. It’s the thing that gets brokers to call you back. It’s the thing that gets a seller to hand you the keys to the company that is their life. And it’s the thing that lets you operate from confidence instead of fear once the deal is yours.
Let me show you exactly how.
What Being Coachable Actually Means
Let’s clear something up first, because people hear “coachable” and think it means agreeable. Soft. A pushover who nods along and does whatever they’re told.
That’s not it at all.
Being coachable means you’ve made peace with a simple truth: you don’t know everything yet, and that’s fine. You’re not expected to. The buyers who win aren’t the ones who walk in pretending to be experts. They’re the ones who walk in prepared to learn from the broker, from the banker, from the seller, from the CPA, from the attorney, from every financial statement that crosses their desk.
A coachable buyer asks questions instead of faking answers. They listen more than they talk. They follow the process instead of trying to outsmart it. They take feedback without getting defensive. And when someone who’s done this a hundred times tells them, “That’s not how this works,” they get curious instead of combative.
Here’s the part most people miss: coachability is not weakness. It’s confidence. It takes a strong, secure person to say “teach me.” The insecure buyer has to act like the smartest person in every room, because their ego can’t survive being a beginner. The coachable buyer doesn’t have that problem. They know they’re capable, so they don’t need to prove it on every phone call. They just need to learn the game and play it well.
And every single person you’ll deal with in an acquisition can feel the difference immediately.
Every Conversation Is Teaching You Something
Before we get into banks and brokers and sellers one by one, I want you to internalize a mindset that runs underneath all of it.
Every conversation in this process is teaching you something.
Every seller conversation teaches you something about how owners think and what they’re really afraid of. Every broker relationship teaches you how quality deals actually move. Every lender request teaches you what a financeable deal looks like. Every financial statement you read sharpens your eye a little more. Every deal you evaluate makes you a better buyer — even the ones you walk away from. Especially those, honestly.
The amateur judges his progress by how many leads land in his inbox. The professional judges it by how well he processes them. You don’t get good at this because every opportunity turns into a deal. You get good at this because you keep showing up, keep learning, and keep getting sharper with every at-bat.
That’s coachability in action. It’s not a personality trait you either have or don’t. It’s a discipline you practice. And it compounds. The buyer who treats month one as tuition is dangerous by month twelve.
Now let me show you why this single trait is the thing that opens every door in the deal.
Why Brokers Bet on Coachable Buyers
Let me tell you how a broker actually thinks, because once you understand it, your whole approach changes.
A broker does not sell businesses to whoever shows up first with the most money. A broker brings prepared, credible buyers to their sellers and they protect their own reputation in the process. Every buyer they introduce to a seller is a reflection on them. If they bring you to the table and you blow up the deal, spook the employees, go around the process, or vanish for two weeks, that broker looks bad to a client they’ve worked hard to earn.
So put yourself in their shoes. Who are they going to bring their best listings to?
It’s not the arrogant buyer who knows everything, argues about the process, and treats the broker like an obstacle standing between him and a deal. It’s the buyer who’s clear about what he wants, organized, responsive, respectful of confidentiality, and here’s the key easy to guide through the steps.
A coachable buyer is a broker’s dream because that buyer makes the broker’s job easier and makes the broker look good to the seller. When you sign the NDA without drama, review the materials properly, ask intelligent questions, follow the process in order, and take direction when the broker says “here’s how this needs to go,” you become the buyer they think of first when the right listing comes in.
The uncoachable buyer does the opposite. He fights the NDA. He tries to contact the seller directly. He thinks every step is a hoop he shouldn’t have to jump through. He treats the broker like a gatekeeper to be beaten instead of a professional to be partnered with. And brokers have long memories. They quietly stop sending him their good deals.
You don’t need to be the loudest buyer in the broker’s inbox. You need to be the one who’s easy to work with and clearly knows how to follow a process. That’s coachability, and in this business it’s worth more than a bigger checkbook.
Why Sellers Hand the Keys to Coachable Buyers
Now let’s talk about the most important person in the entire transaction. The seller.
This is where I see analytical buyers lose deals before the deal even begins. Not because they’re bad people. Not because they aren’t serious. But because they forget what they’re walking into.
To you, this is a business acquisition. To the seller, this might be twenty five years of their life. It might be their family’s income. It might be the thing that paid for their house, put their kids through college, funded every vacation, carried every sleepless night when they didn’t know how they’d make payroll. For a lot of owners, the business isn’t just what they own it’s who they are. Their identity is wrapped up in that company.
Business owners are my kind of people. They’re builders. They’re risk takers. They’re the ones who chose to sign the front of a paycheck instead of waiting around to sign the back of one. They sacrificed, they bet on themselves, they created something that didn’t exist before. And I respect the hell out of that.
So here’s what a seller is really doing when they sit across from you: they’re interviewing you as much as you’re interviewing them. They want to know the thing they spent decades building won’t fall apart six months after they hand you the keys. They care about price, sure. But they also care about their employees, their customers, their vendors, their reputation, their legacy.
Your job isn’t to convince a seller you’re wealthy. Your job is to convince them you’re capable. Capable, prepared, respectful, professional, confidential and coachable.
Why does coachable matter to a seller? Because the coachable buyer is the one who leads with curiosity instead of a spreadsheet. The one who respects the story before analyzing the numbers. The one who asks about why they built it, what they’re worried about, what a good outcome looks like for their people and then actually listens. One of the most powerful tools in any negotiation is simply listening, and listening is a coachable person’s native language.
The arrogant buyer who comes in dangling a slightly higher number while treating the seller’s life work like a line item? Many sellers will take less money to avoid handing their company to that person. I’ve seen it again and again. The prepared, respectful, coachable buyer offering a fair price beats the arrogant buyer with a bigger number who never makes it to the closing table.
Win the person before you win the numbers. And you win the person by being someone they’d trust to carry what they built.
Why Banks Reward Coachable Buyers
Now to the lender, who scares more first-time buyers than anyone else in the process. People think banks are sitting there looking for reasons to say no.
That’s not true. Banks make money by making good loans. A good lender wants to finance good businesses for qualified buyers. But you have to understand what the bank actually is.
The bank is not there to believe in your dream. The bank is there to evaluate risk. And that’s not a bad thing — that’s exactly what they’re supposed to do.
Once you understand that, your whole posture changes. You stop trying to sell the bank on excitement and start presenting a transaction that’s logical, organized, and financeable. You stop begging for money and start trying to understand their process. And that shift from “convince me you’ll fund my dream” to “help me understand what you need to see” is coachability. Good lenders notice it instantly, and they reward it.
The bank is looking at five things: the cash flow and whether it supports the debt, you as the buyer and whether you can lead, your documentation and whether it’s organized, the deal structure, and the overall risk. Notice that two of those five the buyer and the documentation are entirely about you. The coachable buyer shows up organized, honest, responsive, and willing to learn what the bank needs. The uncoachable buyer sends sloppy files, exaggerates the numbers, hides the risks, and asks “can I get approved?” before he can even explain the business.
Banks reward preparation. They reward organization. They reward honesty. They reward buyers who understand the process and ask professional questions “What debt service coverage ratio do you like to see? How do you view seller financing in the structure? What documentation helps you give me meaningful feedback early?” Those questions instantly separate you from the overwhelming majority of first-time buyers, and they’re the questions a coachable person asks because a coachable person is trying to learn the game, not beat it.
Get this right and the bank stops being an obstacle. It becomes one of your greatest partners in building wealth.
This Is Not the Wild West The Bank Does Real Due Diligence For You
I want to spend real time here, because this is the single biggest fear I have to talk buyers out of, and it’s the place where being coachable pays off most.
A lot of first time buyers walk around with a quiet terror in the back of their minds. What if I miss something? What if the books are cooked? What if I buy this thing and there’s a landmine I didn’t see? What if I’m out here alone and I get taken?
I understand the fear. You’re about to make the biggest purchase of your life. But I need you to hear me clearly:
This is not the wild, wild west. You are not out there alone.
Here’s one of the most underappreciated truths in all of acquisitions. Good banks are exceptional at due diligence. A bank is not going to lend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on a flimsy business. They have underwriters. They have credit analysts. They have loan committees. They have experienced professionals whose entire full time job is evaluating businesses and sniffing out risk.
And remember the most important part: they’re risking their own money. They do not want a bad loan. They are highly, deeply motivated to make sure this business is real and the cash flow is dependable. If something doesn’t make sense if the cash flow doesn’t support the debt, if the financial statements don’t add up, if there’s a problem hiding in the numbers a good bank is probably going to find it.
Think about what that means for you. When you buy a business the right way, with quality financing, you’ve got an entire team of seasoned financial professionals independently examining the same business you’re examining and they have every incentive in the world to catch a problem before they hand over the money. That’s not an obstacle. That’s a free layer of protection sitting on top of your own work.
Now, does that mean you stop doing your own homework? Absolutely not. You should understand every business you’re considering, top to bottom. The bank’s due diligence doesn’t replace yours — it stacks on top of it. But it should pull an enormous amount of fear out of this process. You are not a lone gunslinger riding into a lawless town hoping you don’t get shot. You’re a prepared buyer surrounded by professionals a broker, a banker, a CPA, an attorney, an underwriter, a loan committee all of whom have a stake in this deal being sound.
And here’s where coachability ties the whole thing together. The fearful, uncoachable buyer treats all of that scrutiny as the enemy. He gets defensive when the bank asks hard questions. He resents the documentation requests. He sees the underwriter as someone trying to kill his deal. He white knuckles the whole process because he thinks he’s alone against the world.
The coachable buyer sees the exact same scrutiny and feels relief. He understands those hard questions aren’t an attack they’re protection. He leans on his team instead of fighting them. He lets the CPA pressure-test the numbers, the attorney handle the legal exposure, the banker verify the financeability. He knows that trying to do all of this alone is how good buyers miss things, and that the professionals around him exist to catch what he can’t.
Same process. Two completely different experiences. The difference is attitude.
Operate From Confidence, Not Fear
Let me tie this all together, because underneath everything we’ve covered there’s one fundamental choice you get to make about how you show up.
You can do this out of fear, or you can do this out of trust in the process.
The fearful buyer is exhausting to be around, and everyone in the deal can feel it. He’s defensive with the broker, suspicious of the seller, combative with the bank, and convinced everyone’s out to get him. Fear makes him rigid. It makes him uncoachable. It makes him hard to finance, hard to work with, and hard to trust. And ironically, the fear that’s supposed to protect him is the very thing that costs him deal after deal.
The confident buyer is different. Not arrogant confident. He’s done the work. He’s reviewed the financials, analyzed the cash flow, talked to the broker, met the seller, positioned himself with the bank. He’s surrounded himself with professionals he trusts. So he’s not worried, because he’s not winging it. He’s following a proven process, in the right order, with the right people. And that lets him stay calm, stay curious, stay coachable, and stay the kind of buyer everyone wants to do a deal with.
Here’s the truth I’ve watched play out for more than twentyfive years: confidence in this business doesn’t come from pretending you know everything. It comes from trusting a proven process and surrounding yourself with people who know what they’re doing. That’s what frees you from fear. You don’t have to carry the whole thing on your own shoulders, because you were never supposed to.
Be responsive. Be prepared. Be professional. And above all, be coachable because the buyers who stay coachable are the buyers who eventually become owners.
You’re not expected to know everything today. That’s not the standard. The standard is whether you’re willing to learn, willing to trust the process, and willing to let the right people help you. Get that part right, and the brokers call you first, the sellers hand you the keys, the banks become your partners, and the fear that stops most people never gets a grip on you.
That’s the whole game. Attitude and approach. It really is what it’s all about.
Ready to buy a business the right way with a proven process and a team that’s done this thousands of times? At Peterson Acquisitions, helping coachable, prepared buyers move from deal flow to ownership is exactly what we do. Whether you’re just starting to explore or you’re ready to make an offer, let’s talk.
Frequently Asked Questions
Mostly no. An LOI is largely a non-binding framework that outlines proposed terms before the definitive purchase agreement. Typically only a few provisions are binding — most commonly confidentiality and, when included, an exclusivity period. The binding commitment to buy comes later, in the purchase agreement, and remains subject to your contingencies.
An LOI is largely non binding and sets the stage for negotiation, while an Offer to Purchase is a more complete, actionable document that moves the deal forward more decisively. A well-built Offer to Purchase keeps every buyer protection intact through the same contingencies, so being more decisive doesn’t mean being less protected.
At minimum: satisfactory due diligence, financing approval, clean and transferable documentation, lease assignment if location matters, and an acceptable final purchase agreement. These contingencies are your most important protection they let you renegotiate or walk away without penalty if what you verify doesn’t match what you were told.
Most small business acquisitions are structured as asset sales, where you buy specific assets and generally avoid inheriting the seller’s past liabilities. Stock sales transfer the entire entity, including liabilities, and are often preferred by sellers for tax reasons. The right structure depends on tax and liability factors, so your attorney and accountant should advise on it.
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