Acquisition analysis for small-business buyers
You send the seller's package. Within 48 hours you get a written screen of what the business actually earns, what it is worth, whether a bank would finance it at the asking price, and what to ask the seller next. We work with buyers of businesses between $1 and $10 million in revenue. Fees are fixed and published here. Every screen ends in one of three calls: WALK, DIG or BID.
* The Quality of Earnings requirement under SOP 50 10 8.1 applies to certain SBA-financed change-of-ownership transactions from October 1, 2026. Confirm the operative provision and its applicability to your transaction with your lender.
Every screen ends in one of three analytical classifications
A structural problem, or a price the normalized numbers cannot support. You also get the reset price at which the deal would start to make sense.
Worth asking for more. You get the exact list of documents that would settle the open questions, drafted and ready to send to the broker.
Enough conviction to move toward an offer, subject to diligence and professional review, with the structure the numbers support.
WALK / DIG / BID is an analytical screening classification, not a recommendation to enter into or refrain from any transaction.
Services
Fees are fixed and published. Every engagement arrives in writing and answers the questions an investment committee would put to its own analyst.
$600
Fixed fee · 48-hour delivery
Fee credits in full toward Transaction Modeling.
$2,000
Fixed fee · 4–5 business days
$3,000 / month
One active transaction · month to month
Walk Dig Bid provides informational and analytical support for business-acquisition evaluation. It does not provide investment, financial, legal, tax, accounting, valuation, brokerage, securities, lending, or other regulated professional advice. WALK / DIG / BID is an analytical screening framework, not a recommendation to enter into or refrain from a transaction. Analyses are based on available information and stated assumptions and are not guarantees of future results.
Analysis tool
Enter three figures from the offering memorandum. The tool restates the asking price when only part of the add-back schedule survives review. Buyer-side adjustments, which the tool leaves out, usually push the figure further down.
Add-backs represent — of reported EBITDA. In our experience, schedules above thirty percent warrant line-by-line substantiation.
Illustrative analysis based on the figures you enter and stated assumptions. It is not a valuation, and not a prediction of any outcome.
Sample report
An excerpt from a screen of a residential HVAC business in the US Southeast, offered at $3.98 million, or 3.75 times the seller's adjusted EBITDA of $1,062,000.
| Reported EBITDA, per tax returns | $650,000 |
| Add-backs claimed in the offering memorandum | +$412,000 |
| Sustained under review — five items | +$348,000 |
| Rejected, undocumented — two items | −$64,000 |
| Buyer-side adjustments omitted from the memorandum | −$232,000 |
| Market management salary · market rent · key-person replacement · capital expenditure normalization | |
| Supportable EBITDA | $766,000 |
| Value at the offered 3.75× | $2,870,000 |
| Variance to asking price | −$1,110,000 |
SUMMARY: DIG. The opportunity appears to warrant further investigation on a repriced basis. Customer concentration and the working-capital peg are the next lines of inquiry.
The complete four-page report and our engagement checklist. After that, about two notes a month. Unsubscribe whenever you like.
Perspectives
Briefing · September 2026
From October 1, 2026, SOP 50 10 8.1 requires SBA lenders to obtain a Quality of Earnings analysis for certain SBA-financed acquisitions priced at $3.0 million or more. That report is commissioned after the letter of intent. It usually costs $9,000 to $23,000. A $600 screen beforehand keeps that money for the deals that deserve it. Below the threshold no QoE may be required at all, which leaves many buyers negotiating on the seller's numbers with no independent read of them.
Client commentary
The desk
The methods here come from institutional M&A: add-back substantiation, lender-oriented modeling, working-capital analysis. Deals under $10 million rarely get them. The fees that pay for that work do not exist at this size, so the buyer usually screens the seller's numbers alone, if at all. The analysis is led by an investment banking professional who has worked on institutional deal teams, and every file gets the same treatment. Skeptical, quantitative, aimed at what a buyer needs to decide.
We are not a CPA firm, so our deliverables are analysis rather than attestation. Nor are we a broker, and we take no success fee, which means we are paid the same whether you buy or walk away. Where a deal may need a formal Quality of Earnings, we point to the issues that deserve that deeper review and say when specialized diligence looks warranted.
If the numbers hold, we say so. If they break, you see the line item and the page of the memorandum where it happens, and the decision to pursue or complete the deal stays yours.
Walk Dig Bid works at the first pass. Once a deal advances, you may still need legal, tax, insurance and lender diligence, and often a Quality of Earnings. The screen tells you where that work should concentrate.
Frequently asked
They are analytical screening classifications, not recommendations. WALK: the available information raises issues that may not justify additional diligence under the assumptions reviewed. DIG: the opportunity appears to warrant further investigation, subject to resolving the identified risks and questions. BID: the opportunity appears to warrant consideration for advancement to the next stage, subject to further diligence. BID does not mean "buy the business" and WALK does not mean "do not invest." The decision is yours.
No. A Quality of Earnings is a formal engagement, required from October 1, 2026 for certain SBA-financed transactions of $3.0 million or more, and it usually costs $9,000 to $23,000. The screen comes earlier and does not replace it. It tells you whether the deal merits that spend, and hands you the question list when it does.
Yes, the arithmetic is no secret. What you are buying is pattern recognition from reading a large number of offering memoranda, a written basis you can hand to your lender and use in negotiation, and time, since most buyers are screening several deals at once. If the plausible swing in price is not comfortably larger than $600, skip the engagement.
Most offering memoranda permit disclosure to advisors and financing sources. We countersign a standard confidentiality agreement on request, never disclose your materials or the identity of a transaction, and delete files upon request.
The offering memorandum plus any financial statements or tax returns you have, ideally three years of them. Missing material does not stop the engagement. It gets flagged as a lower-confidence area, which is useful in negotiation on its own.
You pay nothing. The clock starts when your materials arrive and runs on US business days.
No. Deliverables are financial analysis prepared for your information. The decision remains yours, and your attorney and accountant remain essential.