Our story
We did this the hard way.
You don't have to.
My wife and I spent the better part of two years trying to buy a small business in the East Bay. We eventually got there — but it was harder than it needed to be, and nobody was building the thing that would have made it easier. So I did.
How it started
Jenny wanted out of corporate. After years in a demanding career, she wanted to own something — something rooted in the community, something that grew things rather than optimized them. She started seriously looking for a business to buy. She landed on horticulture. After nearly two years of searching, we closed in February on Yarrow Nursery and Broadway Terrace Nursery, two beloved Oakland plant shops whose owners were ready to move on after decades of building something special.
Getting there wasn't pretty. We spent months combing through broker listings that were either overpriced, misrepresented, or already under LOI by the time we found them. The deals worth pursuing were almost never publicly listed — they surfaced through word of mouth, chance conversations, personal connections. We got our SBA loan approved, which took its own eternity. We signed NDAs. We reviewed financials that had clearly never been prepared for a buyer. We walked away time after time — after spending thousands of dollars in legal fees and hundreds of hours on research, models, and conversations with lenders and brokers.
We eventually closed — our dream came true. But the whole experience left me with a nagging question: why is this so hard? The seller wanted to sell. We wanted to buy. We were a good fit. The friction was entirely structural — there was no good place for this kind of deal to find its way to the surface.
510 through and through
This isn't a market we discovered. It's home.
I grew up in Piedmont — a small city that sits entirely surrounded by Oakland, which is about right for how I think about home. I went to school here. My parents are here. My kids are growing up here. When I talk about preserving community businesses, I'm talking about the restaurants I grew up eating at, the shops my kids walk past on the way to school, the services my parents rely on. This isn't an abstraction for me.
Born & raised
Piedmont / East Bay
Businesses acquired
Yarrow + Broadway Terrace Nurseries
How we financed it
SBA 7(a) loan
Why we built this
Because the process was broken
The problem
98% of East Bay businesses are never publicly listed.
92%
of small business exits are closures — not sales
McKinsey Institute, 2026
~15,000
boomer-owned businesses in Alameda County alone
SBA / LendingTree data
10–12%
broker commission — before you even close
Industry standard
Most East Bay business owners who want to sell never find the right buyer. They end up closing instead — locking the doors on something they built over decades, putting their employees out of work, and taking the business out of the community entirely. That's not inevitable. It's a matchmaking problem. Out-of-town buyers and national chains have brokers and deal teams solving it on their behalf. Local buyers don't have that. Five Ten Exchange is that infrastructure, built for the 510.
Let's talk — seller or buyer
If you're an East Bay business owner thinking about what comes next, I'd genuinely like to hear your situation — no pitch, no pressure. And if you're a buyer looking for the right opportunity, build a profile and we'll match you with sellers who fit.