Practical intelligence for the people doing the deal, owners selling, buyers buying. No fluff. No theory. Real frameworks from real deals.
What buyers have actually paid for businesses like yours, capped by what a lender will finance against your cash flow. How those two numbers get set, and the tool that finds where they meet.
Calculate your seller's discretionary earnings in two minutes. The number buyers multiply, worked line by line. No signup, nothing stored.
Why AI does not replace experts, it relocates them. The new economics of human expertise, drawn from six established theories into one law.
I didn't set out to build an architectural pattern. I built JCoBee because I'd spent more than twenty years in M&A and knew what a silent formula bug costs. The architecture I built turned out to apply far beyond M&A. This essay names the pattern and explains why it is the correct architecture for AI in any audit-required industry.
The conversation around AI in M&A has been dominated by consulting firms writing about what is possible. It is not a future state. It is happening right now on live deals. But most of what passes for AI in M&A is not intelligence. It is automation dressed up as insight.
The CIM is the seller’s best story. But the public domain is nobody’s story — it’s just the record. Here’s what automated intelligence gathering reveals before you commit to diligence.
DSCR tells you one thing. Bankability tells you everything: whether the structure works, where the covenants bind, and what happens when revenue drops ten percent.
The buyer commits before they fully understand what they’re buying. Not because anyone is hiding something. Because the system doesn’t have a mechanism for deep analysis at the speed deals require. That’s not a people problem. That’s an infrastructure problem.
The CIM tells the seller’s story. The bank statements tell the bank’s story. The gap between them is where every deal gets repriced, renegotiated, or walked away from.
The CIM is the seller’s best story. Your job is to read between the lines. Here’s the systematic framework experienced buyers use to separate signal from narrative.
These aren’t hypothetical scenarios. Every red flag in this article comes from a real deal where the bank statements told a different story than the CIM.
Before you fall in love with a deal, answer one question: can you afford it? DSCR is how the bank answers that question. Here’s how to calculate it yourself.
In lower middle market acquisitions, SDE, not EBITDA, is the number that determines the price, the financing, and whether the deal makes sense for a buyer.
The CIM shows you the story. The bank statements show you the truth. Here’s the 6-step framework for extracting intelligence from bank reconciliations.