
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.
Sacramento sits between two very different deal markets: a local Main Street economy where the average business sells for under $1M, and a Bay Area buyer pool ninety minutes away that prices companies on a completely different scale. This guide profiles 7 verified business brokers in Sacramento with deal bands, fee models and sector focus.
The capital region's economy is unusually stable, which buyers like. State government is the anchor employer, and around it sit large health systems including Sutter, UC Davis Health, Kaiser and Dignity, a professional services layer built on regulatory and lobbying work, and a construction and home services sector that has been running hot for a decade on migration out of the Bay Area.
Beyond the city, the deal flow is agricultural and industrial. Food processing, almonds, rice, wine in Lodi and Amador, agricultural equipment and services, plus distribution and logistics businesses strung along I-5, I-80 and Highway 99. Those companies attract a different buyer list from a Sacramento dental practice, and they need a different adviser.
The California tax position shapes timing more than price. The top marginal state rate is 13.3%, which does not change the multiple a buyer pays but does change what you keep, and it is a conversation to have with your CPA before you sign an engagement letter, not after a letter of intent.
If you would rather scan the field before reading the profiles, the M&A advisors database lists all 7 Sacramento firms below alongside every other adviser we have researched, filterable by city, industry and deal size.
Good Sacramento advisers turn down more sellers than they sign, because a badly prepared listing occupies a slot they cannot refill. Your job in the first meeting is to look like a deal that closes.
Earnings quality decides that faster than anything else. Sacramento owners run heavy add-back schedules, and buyers here know it: trucks, family payroll, and rent paid to an entity you also own all get challenged. If you cannot put an invoice or a payroll record behind a line, assume a buyer strips it and reprices at closing. On a business earning $900,000, a $120,000 add-back haircut costs roughly $480,000 at a 4x multiple.
Concentration is the second filter, and in this market it often means government. A company with one state contract, one health system as its customer, or one grower relationship at 40% of revenue turns a 5x business into a 3.5x business. 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. Bay Area and out-of-state buyers work to their own timetable, and 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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California has a state trade body most credible intermediaries belong to. The California Association of Business Brokers awards the Certified Business Broker designation, and Sacramento Business Brokers publishes both CABB and International Business Brokers Association membership. The IBBA awards the Certified Business Intermediary credential, and M&A Source awards the Merger & Acquisition Master Intermediary for larger transactions.
The other check is the Department of Real Estate. Business sales involving a lease assignment or real property require a DRE licence, and Sacramento firms publish their licence numbers: M&A Business Advisors lists DRE #02056712 for its Roseville office.
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 deserves real care here because the region behaves like a small town in several industries. In construction, food processing and government services especially, a rumour reaches your competitors, your bonding company and your best crew leads within days.
| # | Firm | Typical deal size | Focus sectors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rogerson Business Services | $2M to $100M revenue | Waste and recycling, testing and inspection, medical |
| 2 | Sacramento Business Brokers | Average sale $892,500 | Education, dental labs, retail, professional services |
| 3 | M&A Business Advisors | $1M to $20M revenue | Manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, automotive |
| 4 | Murphy Business Sales Sacramento | Main Street to lower mid | Construction, manufacturing, services, restaurants |
| 5 | Business Team | Up to $100M revenue | Logistics, engineering, construction, food retail |
| 6 | Sunbelt Business Brokers Sacramento | Main Street to lower mid | Services, retail, trades, distribution |
| 7 | Exit Strategies Group | $5M to $100M revenue | Manufacturing, distribution, contracting, B2B services |
Rogerson is the Sacramento firm with the most clearly stated seller profile: an owner planning to exit inside six to twelve months, with a business between $2M and $100M of revenue.
The R Street firm publishes its average sale size, which is a rare and useful piece of honesty: about $892,500. That tells you exactly where its buyer relationships sit.
The Roseville office of a Western US brokerage and M&A firm, working the band where most capital region owners actually sit, and publishing its DRE number.
The Sacramento Murphy office covers the whole capital region and adds business valuation alongside brokerage, which is useful when equipment or a lease carries most of the value.
Business Team runs a Roseville and Sacramento office inside a brokerage that has been selling Western US businesses since 1981, and its cumulative transaction count is the largest of any firm on this list.
The Sacramento Sunbelt office sits inside one of the largest intermediary networks in the world, which matters mainly for buyer reach on smaller listings where volume of contact beats a tailored process.
Exit Strategies is not headquartered in Sacramento, but it runs capital region engagements and it covers the band above what most local brokerages handle, which is where a $10M manufacturer or specialty contractor belongs.
| Buyer type | Usually targets | What they focus on |
|---|---|---|
| Individual SBA buyer | Under $5M purchase price | Owner transition, lender qualification |
| Bay Area relocating buyer | Under $10M purchase price | Cost base, lifestyle, growth runway |
| 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 |
| Agricultural or food strategic | Any size in sector | Supply relationships, capacity, compliance |
| Government services acquirer | $5M+ revenue with contracts | Contract term, renewal risk, staffing |
A Sacramento process is rarely local. If most credible buyers sit in the Bay Area, Southern California or on a private equity platform out of state, thirty or forty parties may sign NDAs and expect documents they will never collect in person: three years of tax returns, the add-back schedule, revenue by customer, the lease, state and county contracts, licences and a redacted staff roster. Emailing a confidential information memorandum widely leaves you with no way to withdraw it and no record of where it went.
Several of those parties are competitors. The most likely buyer for a specialty contractor in the capital region is another contractor bidding the same state jobs, the most likely buyer for a food or agricultural processor is a business already working the same valley acreage, and a government services acquirer competes for the same agency contracts you do. Sending a folder of financials to eight parties, three of whom will never proceed, hands your margins, your pricing and your customer list to businesses you will still be bidding against next quarter.
A confidentiality leak here costs you people first. Crew leads and estimators who hear the company is for sale start taking calls from the firms across town, your bonding company asks questions before you are ready to answer them, and a state contracting officer who learns of a sale second hand starts planning around a transition you have not agreed to. Email attachments cannot be recalled, cannot be watermarked, and tell you nothing about who actually opened them.

Folder-level permissions let an adviser open the general file to forty buyers and contracts to two.
A data room for Sacramento M&A is the permissioned workspace where your broker stages the diligence file and runs Bay Area, Southern California and out-of-state buyers through it at once, without any of them seeing what the others see. It is what an adviser 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 a Sacramento sale 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 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 adviser 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 seven 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 Sacramento to compare these against each other, or check another market if you would rather work with a specialist elsewhere.