Buying a business that doesn't have a broker

I understand that this is an old thread that has recently been revived, but I think it is relevant to the current market. A few caveats to start my response: (1) I have met some outstanding brokers who seem to know their stuff, (2) I am fairly new in my search so have not looked at a lot of deals in-depth, (3) I am a former M&A attorney so am comfortable running a SMB deal without an intermediary, (4) often the initial listing price is high with the expectation that the buyer will talk the seller down some, and (5) when the listings have unrealistic terms it can be hard to determine whether it is the broker who is pushing for unrealistic terms or the seller who is unwilling to follow the broker's advice and continues to demand that unreasonable terms be included. That said, although I think brokers can provide a valuable service in getting sellers ready to sell and guiding them through the sales process, my experience with SMB brokers over the last three months has made me wonder if I would be better served looking for an off-market deal. Here are some examples of items I have recently seen in brokers' deal books and other presentations, all of which are designed to raise the price but turn buyers off almost immediately:

(A) PPP loan forgiveness and covid employee retention credits included as ordinary income in an attempt to boost EBITDA or SDE. (as a buyer we can accept that 2020 was a down year and make appropriate adjustments, but expecting a multiple of 2021 and 2022 earnings that include one-time credits looks dishonest at worst and incompetent at best, scaring potential buyers from wanting to pursue the deal).
(B) Refusal to disclose financials prior to 2020, saying that only 3 years are necessary to finance the deal or that the seller has only been preparing to sell since 2020 so the prior books are not accurate. (Sellers can make the case that financials prior to 2020 are not representative of the current business because the business changed during covid, but failure to provide them leads the buyer to assume that pre-covid numbers are low and the covid numbers may have been temporarily inflated so are not sustainable.)
(C) Q1 2023 numbers that are annualized to show EBITDA or SDE, and stating that Q2 and Q3 2023 are not yet available. (This is especially hard to believe when it is clear the seller is using quickbooks or some software that could produce the financials in a few minutes. It gives the buyer the impression that the numbers for Q2 and Q3 are down but the seller has a fixed number that the seller will not move from.)
(D) Financials that inconsistently use a mixture of cash accounting and accrual accounting, with asterisks denoting which items are each. (Buyers understand that cash accounting can provide some big swings on an annual basis and that sellers want to tell a story of levelized earnings over a few years, but it would be better to provide a set of financials using cash accounting and a set using accrual accounting, in addition to the set used to create the story, so that the buyer can verify that nothing is double counted. It would be best to provide monthly statements so buyers can look at rolling averages.)

It can be hard to know if a broker represents a seller who has a "make me retire" valuation rather than a realistic valuation or if the seller is adamant that the brokers present the information as it was presented, but in all the examples above the brokers tried to tell me that the above were common practices, making me think the brokers did not fully understand key M&A metrics. I understand the brokers don't want to throw their seller clients under the bus, but a simple "that's how the seller sees it" would build the broker's credibility a lot more than stating that the above are common practices. Again, I could have just had bad luck with a series of brokers so will still look at some brokered deals, but the fact I have seen this in the small sample of deals I have looked at makes me pause.

You can do your deal by yourself, but intermediaries can not only keep a deal moving forward, but also keep a deal from blowing apart due to surprises, delays, misunderstandings, personality clashes, etc. I tell my sellers that serious buyers have a natural momentum to complete the transaction and my job is to fill in potholes and remove barriers.