Data Headaches in Legacy Services Businesses, Anyone Else Seeing This?

Over the past year, I’ve been working closely with SMBs going through succession, mostly in the professional services space, accounting, advisory, compliance-heavy verticals. One theme keeps coming up: These businesses run, but no one really knows how, at least not in a way that’s legible to anyone outside the founding team. We’ve seen companies with decent margins and loyal clients but zero internal reporting , sometimes no P&L by service line, no client profitability view, not even standardized delivery workflows. Everything lives in someone’s head or in 12 overlapping spreadsheets. It’s not a red flag, necessarily, just a reminder of how personal and tacit value creation is in smaller firms. But it does make succession, or even a partial transition, really hard. I’m curious how other searchers are approaching this: Do you bake in the “data cleanup” cost post-close? Have you built transition plans around operational visibility? Are there particular verticals you’ve seen that are better or worse on this front?