When I first started looking seriously at SMB acquisitions, I thought the hard part was going to be finding a good business.

I was wrong.
The hard part was figuring out what information I could actually trust.
Every listing sounds good at first.
Seller retiring.
Great growth opportunity.
Strong SDE.
Loyal customer base.
Owner willing to train.
Pre-qualified for SBA financing.
After a while, you start noticing the same problem over and over:
Most listings give you enough information to get interested, but not enough information to make a serious decision.
That gap is dangerous.
Because once you get interested, you start filling in the blanks yourself.
Maybe the SDE is clean.
Maybe the add-backs are reasonable.
Maybe the owner is not that important.
Maybe the customer concentration is fine.
Maybe the SBA financing works.
Maybe the missing information is just normal.
That word “maybe” can waste a lot of time.
That is where my thinking around ADE started to sharpen.
Before LOI, I don’t think the buyer’s job is to prove the deal is good.
The job is to slow down and ask:
What is missing?
What has to be true?
What would a lender question?
What would kill this later?
Am I looking at facts, or am I already trying to make the deal work?
That is why I built ADE around pre-LOI discipline.
Not hype.
Not a magic answer.
Just a structured way to stop believing bad or incomplete information too early.
I wrote more about that here:
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And this is the checklist mindset I wish more buyers used when reading teasers and CIMs:
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Lesson from the first part of the search:
A deal does not deserve trust just because it looks interesting.