For searchers, independent sponsors, family offices, PE, and first-time buyers in the lower middle market. We do the diligence that tells you what you are really buying, and because we have actually run businesses, we can help you run it after the close. Indiana-rooted, and we do not disappear the day the wire hits.
Quality of Earnings and buy-side diligence, including the customer-reference calls a report at this size usually skips. Know what you are buying before you wire.
Quality of Earnings →The operator read: owner dependency, concentration, bench depth, and calls to the customers themselves. The half a financial scope was never built to cover.
The operator read →The operator who ran your diligence can stay on as CFO and operating partner through the first year and beyond. The plan the diligence surfaced, actually executed.
The embedded model →For sponsors and family offices: operator-level bench for a portfolio business that needs a hand, value creation and a steady seat, not just a quarterly deck.
Operating partner →Most diligence at this size stops at grading the numbers. We go further: we pair a CPA who has run more than 100 buyer-side reviews with an operator who has built and run real businesses. One proves the numbers are real; the other tells you whether they will hold, what will break in the first hundred days, and how to fix it. Nearly all post-deal trouble is people, so we diligence the team, not just the numbers.
Buying a business through search, self-funded or backed, means competing for diligence attention against funds writing much larger cheques. The quotes come back priced for a deal three times the size, or the work comes back thin. We built the lower end of our menu for exactly this.
QoEs start at $7,500, and on a pre-LOI deal most searchers start with a Red-Flag Review instead: a short screen for the deal killers, costing less, credited toward the full scope if you proceed. You should not spend full diligence money to find out the deal is not real.
Lenders set their own requirements, so nobody can promise you an approval. What we can do is build to what an SBA lender opens first: proof of cash, a defensible working-capital peg, debt service calculated honestly, and the add-backs we rejected shown alongside the ones we allowed. See lender readiness.
Usually more of the operating read than you expect. A financial scope proves last year was real; it cannot tell you whether the business runs without the seller you are replacing. For a first-time operator that is the risk that matters, and it is the operator read.
Fair, and sometimes the right answer is a bigger firm. Where we win is the deal a national firm will not staff properly at your size, run by an operator and a CPA rather than a junior with a template. If we are not the right read for it, we will tell you on the first call.
We work with searchers, ETA buyers, independent sponsors, family offices and lower-middle-market private equity. Indiana-first, and in the work statewide.
Financial proof and the operating read, run by an operator and a CPA. Send us the deal and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth your diligence budget.
Send us a deal See the four scopes“Consistent knowledge in the finance and scaling of our company. We have three complex divisions, and his ability to navigate and create factual strategies has been a great help.”
Thomas Lauth, Lauth Investigations
Verbatim client review.