The single biggest reason a salaried professional with no family money can buy a $1M business is not nerve or genius. It is a government loan guarantee most people have never heard of: the SBA 7(a) program. Understand how it is structured, and the math that looks impossible at first glance becomes almost routine.
The leverage hiding in plain sight
Ask most people how someone buys a business worth a million dollars and they assume the buyer already had a million dollars, or close to it. That is the wrong mental model. The reality is that the buyer put in a fraction of the price, a bank put in the rest, and the business itself repaid the loan out of its own cash flow. The instrument that makes this possible at scale in the United States is the Small Business Administration's flagship 7(a) loan program.