
8 Best Business Brokers in Des Moines: Fees and Deal Sizes 2026
Compare 8 verified business brokers in Des Moines by deal size, fee model and sector focus, plus what Iowa buyers pay and how to run a quiet sale in 2026.
Dallas-Fort Worth has one of the deepest buyer pools in the country for privately held companies, and one of the widest ranges of advisors chasing them. This guide profiles 10 verified business brokers in Dallas with deal bands, fee models and sector focus.
The metroplex economy is unusually friendly to sellers. Corporate relocations have stacked headquarters along the North Dallas Tollway and up into Plano and Frisco, which brings strategic acquirers close to home. Private equity has been consolidating HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical, veterinary and dental practices across DFW for a decade, and platforms are still buying add-ons. On top of that sit oilfield services, construction and building products, freight and logistics along the I-35 and I-45 corridors, and a large healthcare services market.
Texas also has no state income tax, which changes the arithmetic of an exit. Sellers keep more of the proceeds than they would in California or New York, and out-of-state buyers relocating into DFW keep more of the earnings, which shows up as a slightly stronger bid.
None of that means you should take the first call. Unsolicited buyers pay unsolicited prices. The point of hiring one of the business brokers in Dallas below is to turn one interested party into four or five.
The 10 firms below are the Dallas shortlist. The full M&A advisors database adds every other adviser we have researched, so you can widen to a neighbouring metro or narrow to your own industry.
Dallas advisors are selective because their opportunity cost is high. Given a choice between a well-prepared $8M mechanical contractor and a $2M shop that keeps the books in a spreadsheet, a firm takes the first every time. Getting signed is about removing reasons to say no.
Start with earnings quality. DFW buyers and SBA lenders scrutinise add-backs hard, especially personal trucks, family payroll, and rent paid to an entity you also own. If you cannot document a line with an invoice, assume a buyer strips it and reprices at closing. On a business earning $1.2M, a $150,000 add-back haircut costs roughly $600,000 at a 4x multiple.
Concentration is the second filter. One customer at 40% of revenue turns a 5x business into a 3.5x business, and in oilfield services or construction a single general contractor relationship can be the whole company. Disclose it at the start, because a problem raised in week one is a negotiation and a problem found in week ten is a repricing.
Third, be ready to move. DFW processes run fast because the buyer bench is deep, so a seller who takes two weeks to produce a contract schedule loses the momentum a competitive process depends on. Staging everything in a permissioned workspace is the fix, and our review of the best virtual data rooms covers what each tier costs.
Bring these to your first broker meeting:
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Papermark is our #1 VDR provider for M&A transactions right now. In two deals we used custom branding, dynamic watermarking, and granular permissions.
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Texas has no state licence specific to business brokerage, so credentials come from the trade bodies instead. The International Business Brokers Association awards the Certified Business Intermediary designation, M&A Source awards the Merger & Acquisition Master Intermediary, and the Texas Association of Business Brokers runs a state-level membership. Checking those three narrows the field quickly.
After that, filter on fit rather than reputation. The firms below span a 100x range in deal size, and a brokerage that sells $900,000 restaurants efficiently is unqualified to run a banked process for a $40M distributor.
Approach brokers the way a buyer will approach you: with information, in stages, and without giving away more than the stage requires. You are interviewing them at least as much as they are screening you.
Confidentiality matters more in DFW than sellers expect. Trade networks in HVAC, freight, staffing and commercial construction are tight, and a rumour reaches your competitors, your bonding company and your best crew leads within days.
| # | Firm | Typical deal size | Focus sectors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Generational Group | Middle market, up to $1B | Healthcare, manufacturing, technology, energy, retail |
| 2 | Sigma Mergers & Acquisitions | Main Street to lower mid | 31 industries across Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico |
| 3 | CGK Business Sales | $1.5M revenue and up | Healthcare, HVAC, manufacturing, construction, services |
| 4 | Texas Business Brokers | Main Street | Restaurants, retail, services, wholesale, logistics |
| 5 | ANA Brokers | Roughly $2M to $5M | Manufacturing, construction, food service, medical |
| 6 | Murphy Business Sales Dallas | Main Street to lower mid | HVAC, automotive, retail, medical, transportation |
| 7 | Kratos Capital | $5M to $500M value | Manufacturing, industrial services, distribution |
| 8 | Pinecrest Capital Partners | Middle market | Healthcare, business services, industrials, logistics |
| 9 | Optima Mergers & Acquisitions | Middle market | Healthcare, construction, human capital services |
| 10 | ESA Mergers | $5M to $100M revenue | Manufacturing, industrials, business services, software |
Generational is the largest M&A advisory firm headquartered in Dallas and runs an unusually structured process, pairing exit planning and owner education with a formal sell-side auction.
Sigma has been selling North Texas businesses since 2003 and works the band where most DFW owners actually sit, below the level where an investment bank will take a mandate.
CGK sits deliberately between brokerage and investment banking, taking companies from $1.5M of revenue upward, and its principals came out of large bank corporate finance rather than local brokerage.
Texas Business Brokers runs a strictly performance-based model with no upfront fees, which suits an owner testing the water on a smaller listing.
ANA works the DFW lower middle market and publishes listings in the $2M to $5M range, which is a useful signal of where its buyer relationships actually sit.
The Dallas Murphy office covers the western metroplex from Coppell and adds business valuation and equipment appraisal alongside brokerage, which is useful when equipment carries most of the asset value.
Kratos is a North Dallas middle market bank that keeps its client roster small and puts a senior banker on every engagement, which is the main structural difference between a bank and a brokerage.
Pinecrest advises founders and families across nine industry verticals from a Preston Hollow office, covering sell-side, buy-side and private capital raises.
Optima is run by people who have built and sold their own companies, and its live engagements sit in the $4M to $66M revenue range with strong EBITDA margins, which tells you what kind of business it takes on.
ESA calls itself the M&A firm for the built environment, and that focus is real: manufacturing, industrials and building-adjacent business services rather than a general practice.
| Buyer type | Usually targets | What they focus on |
|---|---|---|
| Individual SBA buyer | Under $5M purchase price | Owner transition, lender qualification |
| Search fund or sponsor | $1M to $3M EBITDA | Recurring revenue, management depth |
| Private equity add-on | $1M to $5M EBITDA | Fit with an existing platform |
| Private equity platform | $3M+ EBITDA | Growth runway, reporting quality |
| Relocated corporate strategic | Any size in sector | Customers, contracts, DFW footprint |
| Employee stock ownership plan | $20M+ revenue | Cash flow stability, succession |
DFW processes run wide. If your advisor contacts thirty private equity groups plus a dozen strategics, forty parties may sign NDAs and expect documents. Emailing a confidential information memorandum widely leaves you with no way to withdraw it and no record of where it went.
A large share of those forty parties compete with you. Private equity has been consolidating HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical, veterinary and dental practices across the metroplex for a decade, which means the sponsors on your buyer list already own a platform doing exactly what you do, and their operating partner reads your file. So does the relocated strategic in Plano that has been trying to open a DFW branch, and the oilfield services competitor whose general manager sat across from you at a bid opening last month. Job costing by contract, revenue by customer and your crew pay bands are the three things a competitor most wants and the three things a CIM contains.
What a leak costs locally is not abstract. Trade networks in HVAC, freight, staffing and commercial construction are tight, and the news travels through them in days. Your best crew leads start taking recruiter calls, your largest general contractor quietly adds a second subcontractor to the next bid list, and the referral sources that feed you work start hedging. If you are a franchisee or lease a yard, the franchisor and the landlord both hear about it before you have chosen a buyer, and both hold consent rights you will need at closing. Email attachments cannot be recalled, cannot be watermarked, and tell you nothing about who actually opened them.

Folder-level permissions let an advisor open the general file to forty buyers and contracts to two.
A data room for Dallas M&A is the permissioned workspace where your advisor stages the diligence file and runs forty buyers through it at once, without any of them seeing what the others see. It is what a DFW banker means when they ask whether your documents are ready.
Papermark is a secure, fully customizable, and developer-friendly data room built for exactly this: a secure data room for your Dallas sale process that keeps the sensitive parts of the file locked while the process runs. NDA agreements sit on the link itself, so a buyer signs before the CIM renders. Dynamic watermarking burns each viewer's email and the timestamp onto every page, the most effective deterrent against a competitor circulating your job costing or customer list. Granular file-level permissions release the general folder to everyone while contracts and payroll detail stay locked to the two parties still standing after bids.
Page-by-page analytics also tell your advisor where to push. When one sponsor spends twenty minutes on the customer concentration pages and another has not opened the file since day two, the follow-up list writes itself. The audit log gives you a permanent record of every view, download and permission change.
The Data Rooms plan is €149/month, or €99/month billed annually, with a 7-day free trial, and includes 3 team members, unlimited data rooms, unlimited documents, a custom domain, dynamic watermarking, NDA agreements, and granular file-level permissions. Open a secure data room before the teaser goes out and reuse it through diligence.
Most virtual data rooms were built for bankers and priced for them. Papermark is a secure data room for modern dealmakers, and it is more customizable and more branded than any other VDR on the market.
If your company sits outside these firms' bands, or you would rather test the market before signing an exclusive, the alternative is approaching buyers directly with an attorney and a CPA supporting you.
If none of the ten above fits, the M&A advisors database lists every firm we have researched by city and by industry, with deal sizes and sectors side by side. Filter to Dallas to compare these against each other, or widen to a nearby metro if the local bench is thin.