Rocky Mountain ETA Ecosystem
Things worth reading before you buy anything.
Acquisition rewards preparation more than most careers do. This is the reading and reference the people in this community actually point each other towards.
Start with the playbook.
The Denver ETA Meetup publishes a free guide to buying and running a business, and it is the single most useful thing to read first.
It runs to 29 pages and covers the whole arc: defining a buy box, finding companies, financing the purchase, getting to a close, and surviving the first hundred days as the new owner.
The meetup is a co-host of this conference, so the guide and the room you will find on November 7 come from the same community.
Download the ETA Playbook (PDF)Articles from the meetup.
Written for people mid-search rather than for people theorising about one. Published by the Denver ETA Meetup.
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Proprietary Search Isn't Just Numbers
Off-market searching, and what actually matters when you are the one doing it rather than reading about it.
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Big News for the SBA Search Ecosystem
An SBA policy change and what it means for searchers and for the ecosystem around them.
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Growth Doesn't Pay the Bills
The hidden cost of growth, and why working capital is the thing that catches new owners out.
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Biz Red Flags & SMBash Discount
The red flags worth spotting early, while you are still deciding whether a business is worth diligence at all.
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Are Lenders Getting Picky?
Market perspective from people lending under SBA 7(a), and what they are saying about deals right now.
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Max Leverage is Dead – Here's Why
Why the most heavily leveraged version of a deal has stopped making sense.
Where this community actually is.
Reading gets you started. Most of what people learn in acquisition comes from other people who are a year or two further along.
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The Denver ETA Meetup
The largest in-person monthly ETA gathering in the country, on the first Wednesday of every month. Networking, a panel or an interview, then more networking.
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Searchfunder
The online community where searchers, investors, and operators post deals, ask questions, and argue about structures. Free to join, and worth reading long before you post.
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This conference
One day a year when the searchers, operators, investors, lenders, and advisors are all in the same building, split across a Search Curious and an Advanced track.
A word of warning
No amount of reading replaces talking to somebody who has closed a deal.
Everything here is a starting point. The parts that decide whether a search works tend to be specific to your situation, and they come out in conversation rather than in a guide.
If you want to study it properly.
Acquisition is taught across this region now, at several depths and price points.
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University courses
CU Boulder's Leeds School of Business runs two graduate courses on entrepreneurship through acquisition, and six regional universities collaborate on this conference.
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Executive education
Non-degree teaching for people already in their careers, measured in days rather than semesters and taught by people who have done the thing.
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The Deming Center
The centre for entrepreneurship at CU Boulder, and the place this conference grew out of. It runs the ETA course and the events around it.
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SBA 7(a) loans
Most self-funded acquisitions in the United States are financed this way. The SBA's own pages are the authoritative description of what the program will and will not do.
Read the playbook. Then come and ask questions.
Saturday, November 7, 2026 · Limelight Boulder · 8:00 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.