methodology.
9 posts tagged methodology.
What 11.4 million PPP loans tell you about every US small business with employees
The 2024 SBA Paycheck Protection Program FOIA release is the closest thing in the public domain to a registry of every US small business with employees. Here is what you can pull from it for M&A sourcing without enrichment.
Add-on acquisitions: how sourcing differs from platform deals
Platform deals get sourced from a national funnel. Add-ons get sourced from a tight radius around an asset the firm already owns, and almost nobody writes about the difference.
DealCloud alternatives: an honest comparison for PE operators
DealCloud is configurable, slow to deploy, and priced for the upper-middle-market. Most firms shopping alternatives need a framework, not another vendor list.
Independent sponsor economics in 2026: what the cohort actually earns
Real fee, carry, and rollover ranges for fundless sponsors, pulled from the McGuireWoods survey and the law-firm primaries that nobody quotes in full.
What proprietary deal flow actually looks like at the lower-middle-market level
Proprietary deal flow is a system, not a tool and not a Rolodex. What the system looks like at LMM scale, and what running it actually costs.
Quality of earnings from the sourcing side: what to know before you commission one
What a deal team should decide about scope, period, and add-back posture before the QoE provider quotes, and how those choices echo back into the next target screen.
What a custom M&A advisory platform actually looks like: a build walkthrough
Seven CDK stacks, sub-$100/month infra, two Bedrock models, and a self-mutating pipeline. The architecture of one middle-market advisory build, with the trade-offs and the parts we'd redo.
What an open EBITDA multiples database would actually need to do
Every result on page one for EBITDA multiples by industry 2026 is either a public-company aggregate from January or a private-company range with no sample size. Here is what a live, sortable, filing-driven version of that table would have to ship.
Reading consolidation pressure off the open web
The macro reports tell you M&A volume is up. They don't tell you which county will roll up next quarter. Here's the data trail that does.