Owner Dependency Killing Deals

After a year of searching, one of the more expensive lessons I've learned is that owner-dependency kills deals — and you usually don't find out until you're deep into diligence. A listing looks solid on paper — good revenue, reasonable multiple, established history — and then you realize the owner IS the business. The relationships, the knowledge, the daily operations — all concentrated in one person who's about to walk away. I started building a framework to screen for this earlier — before the LOI, before the attorney fees, before the months of wasted runway. I wanted a way to look at a listing and assess how structurally dependent it is on the current owner using only what's publicly available. That turned into the Acquisition Intelligence Report. It scores business-for-sale listings across five components — owner-dependency, revenue concentration, operational transferability, listing integrity, and industry context — and delivers a composite score with a verdict: Pursue, Pursue with Caution, or Pass. Each assessment also includes targeted due diligence questions specific to what the analysis uncovered — so if you do move forward on a listing, you know exactly what to verify first. I've attached a sample issue with 7 real assessments. Some highlights: • A FedEx route business scored 74 — contractual revenue follows the routes not the person, a named manager runs daily operations independent of the owner, 14 employees, and an expanding industry model. • A glass and paint store where the listed "manager ensuring continuity" turned out to be the owner — discovered through a public business directory search. Score: 38. • An HVAC business with documented CRM, dispatch, maintenance tracking, and customer database — but a 55% SDE margin that doesn't add up without verification. Score: 67. • A vehicle wrap shop claiming $200K SDE on $240K revenue. The math doesn't survive basic scrutiny. Score: 29. The top-scoring listings get full deep-dive analysis. The rest get one-page summaries with key flags and priority diligence questions. This isn't a deal aggregator — there are good tools for that already. Think of it as: EBIT Pro is your radar, this is your filter. It tells you which deals are structurally worth your time before you spend money finding out. If owner-dependency has burned you on a deal, or if this is the kind of screening you're doing manually, I'd be curious to hear how you're handling it. Sample report here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N5DYe05NqKSZuM7nW3rAF3_159p0GQCG/view?usp=sharing