§1
Verdict
One page, read first. At full diligence it is a supported price with the negotiation levers ranked. On a public-data scan it is a range across margin scenarios, because that is what public data can carry honestly.
How it works
Nine sections, the same every time.
The sameness is deliberate. A report that is rebuilt from scratch each time is a report whose quality depends on the day it was written.
The engagement
- 01
Pay
Card, up front, on the tier you want. No call first.
- 02
Send the listing
The URL, the platform, and anything the seller has already given you.
- 03
Seller data request
Tiers 2 and 3 only: one fixed checklist goes to the seller — Stripe exports, analytics access, cohort data, expense breakdown. The turnaround clock starts when it comes back complete.
- 04
Report
A PDF. The same sections every time, every figure attributed to where it came from.
The report
What is actually in it
§2
Revenue quality
Verified against claimed. Recurring against one-time. Refunds and chargebacks. The revenue trend across 12–24 months rather than the headline number, and whether any single month is carrying the average. Prepayments booked at collection rather than amortised is the classic one, and it flatters a listing enormously.
§3
Churn and cohorts
Logo churn and revenue churn, separately, because they answer different questions. Then the cohort curve: is retention flattening or bleeding? A business losing 8% of customers a month has roughly a twelve-month customer lifetime, which changes the valuation completely and appears in no listing anywhere.
For ecommerce this section becomes repeat-purchase rate and time between orders.
§4
Concentration
Top 1, 5 and 10 customers as a share of revenue. Anything over 20% in a single account is a valuation haircut, not a footnote — it is credit analysis applied to a small business, and it is the section buyers most often discover after closing.
For ecommerce it becomes supplier and SKU concentration: one vanishing supplier, one hero product.
§5
Profit-multiple conversion
The headline. Take the asking price, strip out the real cost base — hosting, model APIs, tooling, support, contractors, payment fees — and produce the actual multiple of profit being paid. Then place it against the verified market rather than against a feeling.
§6
Owner dependency
Hours a week the owner puts in, and what breaks without them. Then the adjustment that follows: what a market-rate operator costs to replace those hours, and what the profit looks like after that cost is in. Profitable at acquisition, not profitable once you fix it.
§7
Distribution durability
The differentiator, and written in full at every tier because it is almost entirely public. Organic traffic durability, domain authority, backlink quality, channel concentration, the paid-versus-owned mix, and whether the traffic survives the owner leaving.
§8
Technical and transfer risk
A dependency map, and the transferability of accounts, domains and payment processors. If the product is a thin wrapper over a model API, this section says what happens when the provider changes the model or ships the feature themselves.
§9
What could not be verified
Always present, in both tiers, and never padded. Every question the data did not answer, listed. A seller declining to answer one of them is itself a finding — and you finish the report knowing exactly what you still do not know.
How it is written
Every figure says where it came from.
Each number in the report is labelled at the point it appears: seller assertion, export from a named system, public source, or my own estimate. That is partly a finding in itself — a business whose figures are all assertions is a different proposition from one whose figures reconcile to exports — and partly a matter of you being able to check my work.
The report analyses the asset. It does not tell you to buy or to walk, and it does not reason about your finances, your risk appetite or your portfolio. Those are your call and nobody else's, and a report that made them for you would be a worse document and a different regulated activity.
It is not an audit and it makes no attestation. It is a buy-side reconstruction from the data available, which is what the decision in front of you actually needs.