A deal team's read, without a deal team's overhead.
Screening on your own capital, with no analyst to run the outside-in questions a CIM cannot answer. toog is the analyst you do not staff, before the personal guarantee executes.
Everyone advising you is paid at closing and goes home. You get to live there.
A fund staffs a team to read a target.
A self-funded search has you.
You carry the principal's judgment and the seller relationship. The outside-in work, the questions a CIM will not answer, is the seat no search of one can staff. That is the seat toog fills.
Principal
Judgment, capital, and the seller relationship, all at once.
That is youAssociate
Sourcing and deal support.
Not staffedSector analyst
Market and competitive read.
Not staffedDiligence lead
The outside-in questions.
Not staffedOne outside-in analyst on demand, reading exactly what a CIM will not: customer concentration, market durability, and founder dependency. No hire, no headcount, no overhead.
Neither a hire you cannot make nor a tool you run alone.
The honest objection is that you could do this yourself, or lean on a data subscription. On a search of one there is no analyst to delegate to, so the real trade is your own hours against the seller relationship you cannot afford to drop.
Doing it yourself
- Every outside-in hour is an hour off the relationship
- A data subscription hands you raw lists, not a verdict
- No second reader to catch what you want to be true
What the evidence pack gives you
- The outside-in read, run in parallel while you court the seller
- Every finding graded, and a Murder Board run against it
- The Inversion Test, stating what would make the read wrong
- No incentive to make a shaky target look acquirable
The comparison searchers actually make is time and risk: a two-week analyst read, cited and graded, for less than the cost of one bad month after close. The point is not more data. It is a read before the personal guarantee.
One live specimen. The pack you would receive, in full.
An anonymized composite, sourced and cited exactly as a live pre-LOI screen would be.
Read the verdict, then download the full pack.
A profitable, stable commercial-HVAC maintenance business at $1.5M EBITDA, presented as a recurring-revenue platform. The wound is dependency: a founder of 19 years personally answers 91% of Google reviews, four of six non-owner roles are contractor or part-time, and three back-office roles have sat open 45–90 days. The "stable recurring revenue" claim is unreconciled against those signals.
Nineteen years of history, EBITDA at the quoted level, and relationships through multiple cycles. HVAC maintenance is structurally recurring, growing 3.8% a year.
Whether the revenue survives an ownership change. Founder-dependent businesses this size show 20–40% revenue at risk on transition without a formal relationship transfer.
Under LOI with a live exclusivity clock, and the personal guarantee has not yet executed. The window to act is now, not after close.
ROUTE a bounded 5-day commercial-foundation diagnostic before the LOI executes, scoped to public signals only. It does not replace the QoE; it tells you what the QoE will not test.
One bounded screen. One bounded answer.
Flat fee, fixed scope, scoped to public signals. No success fee and no next-deal incentive, so nothing points the read.
What it covers
- Founder dependency and customer-concentration signals
- Market durability and operational-modernization gaps
- Every finding graded, with the Inversion Test stated
- Answer on page one, full source register behind it
Where it stops
- Stops short of the QoE and legal diligence
- Not a broker or finder; no fee when you close
- Scoped to public signals, not seller-disclosed data
- Built to inform the lender conversation, not replace it
- No invoice if the read changes nothing; nothing to claim or administer
This is not for every searcher.
It is for the ones who would rather hear the target fails now than discover it after closing on their own capital.
- ✕You want a read that lets you close no matter what it finds
- ✕You cannot walk from a business you have already decided to buy
- ✕You are buying cover for the lender, not a read for yourself
- ✓You would rather hear it fails now than after the guarantee executes
- ✓You ask what breaks the day the founder leaves
- ✓You treat an evidence-graded no as worth more than a confident maybe
Ready for an independent verdict?
Tell us what you're deciding. We'll respond within 24 hours with scope and terms, or tell you if we're not the right fit.
Three ways in. Pick the one that fits the decision in front of you.
The same operating system runs behind all three. The framing, the examples, and the engagement shape are built for who is carrying the decision.