Why I stopped offering monthly advisory to searchers (and what I'm doing instead)

I've had intro calls with a handful of searchers over the past few weeks. Smart people, serious about getting a deal done. I pitched them a monthly advisory retainer. Nobody signed up. Took me about a week to figure out why, and it wasn't the price. A monthly retainer presupposes that you have a consistent stream of deal activity that requires ongoing strategic input. Most searchers don't — you have long stretches of sourcing and pipeline-building, punctuated by short windows of intense deal-specific activity. A retainer optimized for the second thing is the wrong product for the first thing. So I rebuilt the offer around what searchers in active search actually need. The 90-Day Deal Sprint — $4,500 flat Three months. Three defined deliverables. Hard stop at day 90. Month 1 — Buy Box & Target Architecture Most buy boxes I see are too generic to be useful. "$1–3M EBITDA, service business, owner-operated" describes about 400,000 businesses. We sharpen it: specific industries, owner profiles, geographic filters, deal characteristics that match your capital structure, timeline, and operating background. Then we build the outreach infrastructure around that specific target — not a template, a system built for your search. You finish Month 1 knowing exactly what you're hunting and why, with a working target list. Month 2 — Live Deal Review & Pipeline Stress-Test You bring everything in your current pipeline. We go through each target together — stated SDE vs. likely real SDE, asking price vs. defensible price, deal structure, red flags worth investigating before you spend 40 hours on diligence. I tell you which ones are worth pursuing and which ones to walk away from. If the pipeline is thin, we spend Month 2 building one through direct outreach. Not BizBuySell. Off-market. Month 3 — LOI Construction By Month 3 you should have at least one deal worth pursuing seriously. We build the LOI together — price, structure, seller financing terms, earnout language, deposit protection. You go into that negotiation knowing your number and how to defend it. You don't show up hoping the seller agrees. You show up with a position. At the end of 90 days you either have a deal moving toward close, or you have a materially sharper search than you started with. Either way, you're not where you are today. If you want to continue after 90 days, that's available — but it's your call, not a default subscription. If this is relevant to where you are in your search, DM me or reply here and I'll send details. — Heather buy-scale-sell.com