Know what's wrong with the deal, before you wire.
Micro-DD is a 48-hour red-flag brief on the business you're buying: the seller's numbers sanity-checked, every add-back verified or challenged, liens and litigation surfaced, and the deal terms graded against market. Five to ten pages. Every claim traceable to a cited source.
$750 flat, paid up front · 48 hours · no call, no retainer · questions first?
We ran this on a deal that went bankrupt.
A real $2.1M HVAC acquisition, run blind against a hard information cutoff the day before it closed, from public records only. The engine said do not close on current information. The buyer closed, and the business went bankrupt.
Every issue public records could reach, the blind lanes surfaced. The full finding-by-finding scoring is published, gaps disclosed.
Four checks. One honest read.
The brief is built around the four places small-business deals actually go wrong, and it opens with the strongest finding, not a summary of the listing.
Financials sanity
Claimed revenue and SDE tested against public signals and industry benchmarks. Every add-back marked verified, plausible, or challenged: owner salary, one-time expenses, personal run-throughs, all of it.
Red flags, ranked
UCC liens, litigation, license exposure, customer concentration, owner-dependence, and why the seller is really selling. Opens with the strongest deal-killer.
Deal-terms check
Seller note, non-compete, lease assignment, working-capital peg: each graded market-standard, buyer-favorable, or seller-favorable.
Questions for the seller
The exact list for your next call, ordered by what the answers would change.
Your LOI won't wait ten business days.
Traditional third-party due diligence runs about $5,500 and ten business days. Micro-DD delivers in 48 hours, while the deal is still yours to walk away from.
~$5,500 · 10 days
A full workup, priced and paced for deals that can wait. By the time it lands, your exclusivity window is half gone.
$750 flat · 48h
The red-flag screen that tells you whether this deal deserves the deeper spend, before the deposit and before the QoE.
The deal after you sign.
Micro-DD is the pre-LOI screen: should you even pursue this listing? Once you're under LOI, the question changes, and so does the brief.
You signed the LOI. Now find out what breaks the deal, before you spend on QoE.
A five-to-seven-day sourced brief on the business you're buying: the growth story stress-tested, concentration and change-of-control risk surfaced, litigation and liens checked, owner-dependence sized, and a straight call on whether any of it should move your price. Every claim traceable to a cited source.
Red-flag triage, not a financial reconstruction. Buy this before the $15K QoE, not instead of it. The QoE-grade version runs five figures and a week-plus. This is the triage layer under it, sourced, in about a week, at a fraction of the price.
Two working days, one signed callMicro-DD · $750, fixed
Five to ten pages. Verdict on page one.
A decision block opens the brief: proceed, proceed with conditions, renegotiate, or walk, with the three reasons driving it and the top red flags confidence-tagged. Delivered as PDF and editable Word.
If the brief doesn't surface at least one material finding, or one verified deal question you didn't already have, you owe nothing.
That's the bar the work has to clear: something you didn't know that changes your next conversation with the seller.
Weighing a venture investment or a larger acquisition instead? The full Verdict report is the deeper instrument: ten sections of investor diligence on one company. See the full report.
Two add-ons for the concentration risk.
Bolt either onto a Micro-DD or Confirmatory order. Both work from your data room, and both come back sourced.
Customer-concentration & churn forensics
Reconstruct top-account concentration and cohort retention from your data room, then stress-test what happens if the #1 customer walks.
Add to a brief Add-on · Key-Person DependencyKey-person dependency scoring
Score how much of the business walks out the door with the owner, and what earnout, holdback, or retention terms that justifies.
Add to a briefConcentration risk, customers and people. The two ways a small business quietly depends on one thing. Take both together.
Straight answers.
Send the listing, the asking price, and the claimed SDE.
You'll have a flat quote within hours and the brief on your desk in 48. Your deal data stays confidential: I never contact the seller or broker, an NDA is available on request, and client files are deleted on your instruction.
Decision-support research, not investment advice. Verify material findings independently.