For business buyers · pre-LOI to pre-close
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.
From $500, one flat quote · 48 hours · no call, no retainer
What it checks
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.
Why 48 hours matters
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.
Traditional third-party DD
~$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.
Micro-DD
From $500 · 48h
The red-flag screen that tells you whether this deal deserves the deeper spend, before the deposit and before the QoE.
Already under LOI?
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.
$1,500 to $3,500 flat · quoted per deal · rush available
What lands in your inbox
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.
The Micro-DD guarantee
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 reportGo deeper
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.
Questions
Straight answers.
What does a Micro-DD brief cost?
From $500, as one flat quote confirmed before any work starts. A listing-only screen on a smaller deal sits at the low end; add-back verification with seller documents in hand, or a complex multi-entity deal, scopes higher. Traditional third-party due diligence runs about $5,500 and ten business days. Micro-DD delivers in 48 hours.
What do you need from me?
The listing or company name, location, asking price, claimed SDE or cash flow, and where you are in the deal. Seller documents such as the P&L, tax returns, or CIM unlock real add-back verification; without them the financials check works from public signals and says so plainly.
Is this a full quality-of-earnings review?
No. Micro-DD is the fast screen that comes before one: it tells you whether the deal survives contact with scrutiny before you pay thousands for a full QoE or wire a deposit. If the numbers hold up, you walk into the deeper diligence with a ranked list of what to verify.
Is my deal kept confidential?
Yes. I never contact the seller or the broker, never disclose who asked, and never reuse client work. Anything you share stays between us.
Mid-deal right now?
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.
From $500, one flat quote · 48 hours · no call, no retainer
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.