Retiring boomers add to numbers of businesses for sale.

It's been a busy year for Sunbelt Business Sales and Acquisitions. Through July, its Torrance office has brokered 76 transactions--more than the 70 completed for all of 2004.

Sunbelt, which mostly caters to the buyers and sellers of small businesses, has been so busy that it recently moved into a new building and hired additional brokers.

"We're matchmakers," said Ron Hottes, who owns the largest franchise of the largest small business brokerage in the nation, Atlanta, Ga.-based Sunbelt Business Advisors LLC. "When a business owner wants us to sell their company, we sit down and get to know them, to find out what they want. If we don't know them, we can't guide him to the right kind of buyer."

Driving the growth? Part of it is demographics, with the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation approaching retirement age, and part of it is the growing economy, which over the past several years has generated enormous amounts of capital in search of investment opportunities.

"There's more private equity capital out there, looking for a place to go, so there's more competition to buy the companies," said Larry Simon, a principal at Clearview Capital LLC, a Los Angeles investment firm that mostly buys companies with profits of $3 million to $15 million.

Sunbelt was founded in 1979 in Charleston, S.C., but didn't open a second office until 1991 and only began franchising two years later. Today, it has hundreds of franchises in the U.S., Canada and other foreign countries.

Other companies are getting in on the action. Among the competitors are Citigroup Geneva Capital Strategies Inc., a division of Citibank Inc., and RSM EquiCo Inc. a division of Bloomington, Minn. accounting firm RSM MeGladrey Business Services Inc.

The firms not only match up buyers and sellers, but help the often inexperienced principals with valuation and financing.

"This may be their one and only merger and acquisition event in their lifetime. So there's a lot of handholding and explaining of the process that brokers do to prepare for this huge and very emotional transaction for them," said Adam Abramowitz, an investment banker at Barrington Associates in Los Angeles, which handles larger transactions of at least $25 million.

At the Torrance office of Sunbelt, buyers can search for companies by size, location or industry on an online database, which currently lists about 350 companies for sale, most for less than $1 million. The average business sold through Sunbelt is about 20 years old.

Prior to the online revolution, small business owners would sell their businesses using much lower-tech methods--including word of mouth, the use of attorneys or accountants, or even by posting classified ads. That still happens, but now they can access brokerage Web sites for far more comprehensive listings.

About 75 percent of the businesses are sold by owners looking to retire. "They want to slow down, enjoy life, their wives want them to slow down, and fewer kids are interested in taking over the family business," said Hottes, who bought the Torrance franchise in 1997.

Sunbelt won't disclose revenues but it typically gets 10 percent of the total value of the deal.

In one deal, 50-year-old former telecom executive Corey Ford bought La Mirada-based Clean Comedians from founder Adam Christing, a comic magician.

Ford wanted a company with growth potential that would offer a better return on his investment than stocks and bonds--and it had to be fun.

Christing, meanwhile, felt he didn't have the business acumen to grow the company further. After running Clean Comedians for 19 years, he was ready to cash out and move on to something new. But like most owners of small businesses, he was emotionally invested.

Sunbelt broker George Hicks suggested how to finance the deal, recognizing that banks dislike providing loans to buy companies with few tangible assets. A common structure: a down payment of 25 percent, with the rest of the purchase price paid over time, often on an earn-out basis.

In the case of Clean Comedians, Ford agreed to give Christing a performance-based bonus of 60 percent of the transaction price, if the business grew for seven years at its current pace.

"Without that piece, the deal wouldn't have happened, we wouldn't have been able to meet on the price," Christing said. "It's like putting a price on a child. It's very painful."