Everything you need to know about the business you just bought is not in the files. Not because the seller is hiding it. Because they can't tell you what it is. To them it isn't knowledge. It's just how it's done. I tested that on the company I run. Froze a key of 63 operating constraints, hid it, and pointed analysis at our own records to see how many it could recover. Six. Ten percent, at 79 percent precision. What came back was accurate. There just wasn't much of it. So "we'll read the files during transition" is budgeting for something that doesn't exist. But the same run turned up 18 constraints that had never been written down anywhere. Fourteen of them came out of one table: the log of every time somebody overrode the normal rule. A rule that's documented is already in the system. The ones that aren't stay invisible until something breaks them and a person reaches in. The fix is the rule. So log every correction. Every time you do something and the seller says "no, we don't do it that way," or "not that crew on that job," write it down verbatim, including why. Nobody asks for that document in diligence, and it's where most of the operating knowledge lives. The window closes when they leave. After that you rediscover each rule by breaking it, usually in your busy season. N=1, and the company was my own. Whether it transfers is what I'm testing next. If you're in a transition right now and want to compare notes, Iet's talk.