Section 03
Where the Money Flowed
Podcast cohort match rate
The shape of FY25 lending
Where dollars concentrate
Acquisitions are the dollar-densest deal type: 9.2% of the count, 20.4% of the dollars in FY25. Median $715K against $157K for existing-business loans. The industries winning those dollars aren’t the ones on X. Specialty Trades booked more acquisition loans in FY25 than Restaurants. Acquisitions in the cluster grew 56% in four years.
Below: scorecard, cluster heatmap, growth/volume quadrant, and three named industries — one surging, one fading, one counterintuitive.
| Deal type | Loans | Dollars | Avg loan | Median | Share (count) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Existing / Expansion | 52,398 | $23.23B | $443K | $157K | 62.0% |
| Startup (pre-open) | 12,352 | $7.50B | $607K | $300K | 14.6% |
| New Business (<2 yrs) | 11,945 | $5.07B | $425K | $100K | 14.1% |
| Acquisition / Change of Ownership | 7,765 | $9.20B | $1.18M | $715K | 9.2% |
Cluster heatmap
Where acquisitions cluster
Top 15 clusters by total FY25 loan count. Column-normalized intensity — darker cells are the leader within that deal type. Restaurants dominate startups, Specialty Trades dominate existing-business loans and acquisitions. Miscellaneous Retail carries the amber marker for the 2022 NAICS reclass.
| Industry cluster | Acquisition | Startup | New Biz | Existing | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurants & Food Service | 949 | 2,695 | 1,454 | 4,043 | 9,141 |
| Specialty Trade Contractors | 704 | 573 | 970 | 5,242 | 7,489 |
| Miscellaneous Retail† | 561 | 628 | 803 | 3,006 | 4,998 |
| Manufacturing | 542 | 443 | 659 | 3,334 | 4,978 |
| Administrative & Waste Services | 460 | 732 | 742 | 2,881 | 4,815 |
| Other Health Practitioners | 303 | 671 | 561 | 2,613 | 4,148 |
| Transportation & Warehousing | 188 | 267 | 663 | 2,732 | 3,850 |
| Wholesale Trade | 276 | 143 | 403 | 2,706 | 3,528 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 204 | 1,360 | 463 | 1,326 | 3,353 |
| Building Construction | 104 | 230 | 429 | 2,538 | 3,301 |
| Management & IT Consulting | 141 | 117 | 446 | 2,411 | 3,115 |
| Personal Care (Salons, Spas) | 139 | 655 | 474 | 1,679 | 2,947 |
| Auto Repair & Maintenance | 329 | 272 | 394 | 1,720 | 2,715 |
| Other Repair & Services | 215 | 464 | 333 | 1,381 | 2,393 |
| Food & Beverage Stores | 478 | 430 | 366 | 1,060 | 2,334 |
Sector quadrant
Four-year sector shift: FY21 → FY25
Each dot is a 2-digit NAICS sector. X-axis is FY25 loan count (log scale). Y-axis is the four-year growth rate. Top-right is the winners’ quadrant: high volume, still growing. Bottom-right is the fading-but-large cluster. Sectors 44 and 45 carry amber rings because the 2022 retail reclass moved loans across that boundary — read them as a pair.
Growth × Volume — sector table (mobile view)
| Sector | Loans | Growth | $M |
|---|---|---|---|
| Specialty Trade Contractors | 11,227 | +81.9% | 4550 |
| Restaurants & Food Service | 10,519 | +42.1% | 7860 |
| Management & IT Consulting | 8,802 | +67.9% | 3730 |
| Personal Care (Salons, Spas) | 8,772 | +65.9% | 3870 |
| Other Health Practitioners | 8,711 | +31.7% | 5080 |
| Miscellaneous Retail⬤ | 5,028 | +117.0% | 2750 |
| Administrative & Waste Services | 4,823 | +58.9% | 1640 |
| Food & Beverage Stores⬤ | 4,485 | -31.0% | 2790 |
| Wholesale Trade | 3,528 | +21.2% | 2460 |
| Transportation & Warehousing | 3,440 | +10.6% | 1170 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 3,360 | +114.8% | 1900 |
| Manufacturing (durable) | 2,436 | +1.4% | 1890 |
| Real Estate | 1,716 | -14.0% | 880 |
| Education | 1,465 | +92.5% | 690 |
| Manufacturing (food/textile) | 1,436 | +12.6% | 790 |
| Finance & Insurance | 1,430 | +1.8% | 630 |
| Manufacturing (chemical/paper) | 1,111 | -6.7% | 950 |
| Information & Media | 812 | +58.3% | 320 |
| Agriculture & Forestry | 711 | -14.3% | 540 |
| Postal & Courier | 413 | +15.4% | 260 |
| Mining & Oil/Gas | 141 | +6.8% | 130 |
| Utilities | 110 | +7.8% | 70 |
FY21–FY25 SBA 7(a)+504. Sectors with FY25 count ≥100 shown. Thresholds at n=2,000 loans and 40% growth. (combined, FY21-FY25, n=22, 2-digit NAICS sectors)
Three industries, read closely
The quadrant tells you where the dots are
The quadrant tells you where the dots are. These three tell you what the dots mean.
SURGING · FY21-FY25
Specialty Trade Contractors
Specialty Trade acquisitions grew 56% in four years — the fastest-growing acquisition category in the 7(a) book.
HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and roofing are the real acquisition category. Acquisitions in this cluster grew from 452 in FY21 to 704 in FY25. HVAC (NAICS 238220) alone booked 153 acquisition loans in FY25 at a median $889K. The podcast cohort talks about laundromats more than it talks about HVAC; the FOIA file has the opposite ratio.
FADING · FY21-FY25
Physician & Dental Offices
SBA-financed physician and dental acquisitions dropped 35% in four years while the SBA book grew.
In FY21 an SBA-financed practice purchase was common; in FY25 they're 35% rarer — even as total 7(a) volume grew. Independent dentists and doctors who want to sell are talking to private-equity roll-ups and hospital systems, not 7(a) desks. Small-practice succession is exiting the SBA ledger.
COUNTERINTUITIVE · FY18-20 vintage, observed through FY25
Transportation & Warehousing
Trucking loans from the 2020–2022 vintage are charging off at 4.25% — nearly 2x the SBA program average.
Transportation & Warehousing (mostly independent trucking) looks boring in the quadrant: +11% volume growth, middle of the pack. But the 2020–2022 vintage — operators who bought rigs at peak spot rates — is now the SBA's biggest loss category. 4.25% chargeoff, above restaurants, construction, and every other >500-loan cluster. Deviation from the FY25 default window is required: chargeoffs peak 3–5 years after origination, so FY25 vintages haven't had time to mature.
Deep-dive · The podcast cohort
Ninety-eight percent of podcast deals are not in the SBA file
If you follow acquisition-entrepreneur podcasts, you hear about hundreds of deals a year. We transcribed 988 episodes from the major shows and extracted 990 named deals, FY21–FY25. Then we walked each one through a four-gate SBA match: Change of Ownership classification, approval date within a year of acquisition, state alignment, and a loan-to-price sanity check. At the strict gate, 20 of 990 deals match. At the softer gate that relaxes checks where cohort metadata is missing, 66 match. The podcast cohort is a real signal about what operators are buying — and a small slice of the file that underwrites them.
Match-rate decomposition
Where candidates fail: Change-of-Ownership classification knocks out 91.3% of prefilter rows — the deal was real, but SBA coded it as Existing or Expansion. Date alignment fails 57.7%, loan-to-price fails 27.1%, state mismatch fails 17.9%. Rows can fail on multiple gates.
When the cohort uses SBA, they use it the way everyone else does
| Gate | n | p25 | Median | p75 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strict 4-gate (all metadata required, all gates applied) | 20 | $712K | $976K | $1.95M |
| Soft 4-gate (gates applied only when cohort metadata non-null) | 66 | $753K | $1.65M | $2.63M |
| SBA-wide acquisitions (FY21–25, business_age='Change of Ownership') | 31,221 | $303K | $683K | $1.52M |
Cohort strict-gate median ($976K) and soft-gate median ($1.65M) are within an order of magnitude of SBA-wide acquisition median ($683K FY21–25 pooled; $715K FY25-only). Gap is directional, not a clean multiple.
Where the cohort over-indexes
Among the 66 soft-gate cohort matches, some clusters appear more often than SBA-wide acquisition mix would predict. Over- index = cohort cluster share divided by SBA-wide cluster share.
| Cluster | Cohort n | Cohort p50 | Over-index |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accounting & Tax | 8 | $1.38M | 2.43x |
| Other Professional Services | 5 | $3.40M | 1.85x |
| Other Repair & Services | 5 | $1.10M | 1.40x |
| Wholesale Trade | 5 | $2.63M | 0.99x |
| Manufacturing | 9 | $1.51M | 0.90x |
| Specialty Trade Contractors | 9 | $774K | 0.78x |
| Administrative & Waste Services | 6 | $967K | 0.71x |
| Other Health Practitioners | 3 | $3.72M | 0.56x |
cohort_n>=3 is below Rule 5's comparable-deal floor (n>=5) and is disclosed in-text as a directional signal, not a rate claim. Read as directional, not a rate.
Lenders funding the cohort
Across the 66 soft-gate matches, Live Oak alone accounts for 25.8% of the cohort. The rest is a long tail.
| Lender | Cohort deals | Share | Avg loan | Median |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live Oak Banking Company | 17 | 25.8% | $2.15M | $1.97M |
| The Huntington National Bank | 5 | 7.6% | $1.17M | $1.51M |
| First Internet Bank of Indiana | 4 | 6.1% | $2.75M | $2.50M |
| Needham Bank | 3 | 4.5% | $1.03M | $1.03M |
| Byline Bank | 3 | 4.5% | $4.64M | $4.46M |
| United Midwest Savings Bank National Association | 3 | 4.5% | $1.73M | $1.74M |
| Truist Bank | 2 | 3.0% | $763K | $763K |
| LendingClub Bank, National Association | 2 | 3.0% | $3.72M | $3.72M |
| CIBC Bank USA | 2 | 3.0% | $1.27M | $1.27M |
| United Community Bank | 2 | 3.0% | $4.00M | $4.00M |
Soft 4-gate cohort matches grouped by lender_id. Cohort total n=66. Small denominators — read as who shows up, not market share.
Three deals, on the record
These are the kind of matches the 4-gate filter holds onto. Each guest discussed the deal publicly on a podcast; each shows up in the SBA file at 0.95 match confidence.
James Bloom
Excel Mechanical Contractors · MD · 2019
Commercial HVAC (NAICS 238220)
Plumbing/HVAC deal in Maryland, 93% loan-to-price. Small-deal SBA example in the section's flagship surging category.
Lender: SouthState Bank, National Association
Kevin Bibelhausen
Heritage Fabrics · NC · 2023
Wholesale piece goods (NAICS 424310)
$8M wholesale purchase with a $5M SBA loan — evidence the cohort does execute the larger end of SBA acquisition financing.
Lender: Byline Bank
Curt Neider
Illuminate Billing Advocates · UT · 2020
Medical billing (NAICS 541219, Other Accounting Services)
B2B services acquisition at 93% loan-to-price. Accounting & Tax over-indexes 2.43x in the cohort — medical billing sits at the edge of that cluster.
Lender: CIBC Bank USA
Methodology & data
NAICS hybrid rollup.The quadrant chart uses 2-digit NAICS sectors because the 2022 reclass moved specific 6-digit codes between sectors 44 and 45 (retail) and reshaped the 44/45/72 landscape in ways a 6-digit rollup would misattribute as growth or decline. Cluster-level views (heatmap, named industries) use LenderHawk’s naics_clusters mapping, which collapses 6-digit codes into revenue-meaningful groupings (e.g., “Specialty Trade Contractors” aggregates NAICS 238xxx). Sectors with a known reclass boundary carry an amber ring.
4-gate cohort filter.Each extracted podcast deal is tested against four gates: (1) match_confidence ≥ 0.7 against business name and state; (2) business_age = “Change of Ownership” in the SBA record; (3) approval_fy within ±1 of the stated acquisition year; (4) SBA gross_amount ≥ 25% of stated purchase price. Strict mode requires all four; soft mode relaxes a gate when cohort metadata is missing. The match rate of 2% / 6.7% reflects the denominator of the SBA file, not an editorial opinion about the podcast cohort.
Rule 5 floor. The over-index table uses cohort_n ≥ 3, below the normal comparable-deal floor (n ≥ 5). Those three rows are disclosed in-line as directional signal, not rate claims.
Read next
Follow the thread
- Section 02 — The Lender League Table. Live Oak’s 25.8% cohort share is the lender-side of this section’s acquisition story.
- Section 04 — Cost of Capital. Dollar density drives lender selection; rate dispersion is how that selection gets priced.
- Section 05 — Borrower Playbook. The 2020–22 trucking vintage callout expands there with full charge-off curves.