Self-Funded to Investor-Backed: Does it ruin the joy of owning the business?

For seven months I've been pursuing a self-funded search focused on small IT services businesses I could close without external investors, based on my own capital, senior debt, and vendor financing. At this micro end of the market, I've found businesses I've liked, but haven't been able to close one: valuations and earnings normalisation are where deals consistently fall apart. I'm now reconsidering my approach and would welcome a sanity check from those more advanced on this journey than me in the community. I spent nearly six years running P&L and client relationships for a £20M IT services portfolio before leaving to search, and prior to operations, served in a variety of technical roles. I've brought a "tech first" approach, creating bespoke tools which have consistently generated conversations with sellers (Due to interest from others, I'm about to launch this side-project as a user-friendly web-based tool at brokerless.co.uk.) The thesis, I thought, made sense: retirement-age owners, low competition from PE, direct outreach and relationship building without intermediaries. I've prepared and negotiated three possible deals, but notwithstanding general accounting shenanigans, I'm seeing vastly inflated valuations from the seller (up to 10x in one instance), or unwillingness to deduct management replacement costs from adjusted EBITDA. I think this is financial illiteracy rather than malice, but it has now been a blocker several times. In short, I think there are some well performing businesses at this end of the scale, but I'm spending a lot of time on those that aren't, and even for the good companies, there is huge key person dependency on the seller as most of the business is in their head, though some of this can be mitigated by my domain expertise - not all, especially their relationships. Following the ETA conference at LBS the other week where I spoke to a number of searchers and investors alike, the common refrain seemed to be aim bigger and accept less equity in exchange for a more sane business, as well as investors with expertise who can support and enable from DD through to running the company. I see the logic here, but in the Found and Funded podcast, Adam Johnson also said his investors told him "we can and will fire you" and another episode talks about the many covenants and restrictions that can be placed on the searcher who ultimately ends up as a minority shareholder. Seems like investors might help you get over the line, but this model can rob you of autonomy and possibly the joy of actually running the business if you're entirely subservient to your board. I'm at a fork in the road where I need to decide whether to persist with what I'm doing, or aim for something bigger, but concerned I might be trading what I really want from this experience - autonomy and growth - in order just to close a deal. Curious how others have thought about the autonomy trade-off - is accepting a less than majority equity position actually as constraining as it sounds, or does it depend entirely on the investor?