STOP PICKING YOUR FINANCIAL DILIGENCE PROVIDER BASED ON SOCIAL MEDIA. Enough's enough. It's on us as real diligence providers to get this message out and myself and the Hollywell team are just bad at marketing and getting the word out. We are seeing just awful QofE deliverables on smaller deals (Traditional search and ETA). No, a basic cash proof and a shiny PDF does not pass muster. Regardless if you choose Hollywell or not, make sure the your QofE provider has real deal team audit and diligence experience. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS QofE Lite. It's a crap marketing term, it is and always should have been full diligence just for smaller deals. Hollywell's FDD team ALL CAME FROM BIG-4 AUDIT AND DEALS. And we don't send the second half bill if we find something that leads to you walking away from the deal. Seriously, skimping on financial diligence when about to spend millions alongside a life changing event is nonsense. GET REAL DILIGENCE DONE DAMMIT. Alright, we'll do better about getting the message out more consistently. Getting off my soap box now. Go get 'em, searchers.

No matter how successful, kids keep you humble. Am a daily shuttle for activities for them, and they still ask (whine) for Mom to do it. Little demons.

Confidence in a deal should come from what you've verified — not from what you've been told, not what a searcher has fallen in love with, not what the model projects, or now what the management team believes. Conviction built on diligence holds up. Conviction built on optimism tends to erode right around the time you're trying to integrate the business. Seriously, when we or any of your advisors shows you a red or yellow flag, listen to it!

Optimism is what makes you want to do a deal. Skepticism is what makes the deal worth doing. You need both at the table — the conviction to move forward and the discipline to verify everything before you do. The best dealmakers aren't pessimists. They're just very hard to fool. Let us help you searchers not look like fools. The real, senior, big-deal trained @NumeraAdvisory team is here to help.

The Numera Advisory team is quite excited to be part of the 2026 Booth-Kellogg ETA Conference. Am glad it's in October. Try not to go that far north after 1 Nov any more. Searchers, good luck, search is certainly not for the weary. etaconference.com/

Sellers underestimate how much a sophisticated buyer's diligence team will find. Buyers underestimate the same thing. The result is a lot of surprise discoveries post-close that could have been surfaced, priced, or resolved with a proper QofE before signing. Due diligence isn't about distrust. It's about doing the job right. Get real diligence done. Even if you don't choose Numera Advisory, make sure you get a real scope you are comfortable with and ensure all+ is done and the results well communicated.

What do you call a magic dog? A labracadabrador. Not all posts have to be about serious accounting and deal diligence. Most will be. Others will be about loyalty to toaster strudels and pizza rolls.

Everyone wants a clean deal. Almost nobody wants to do the work that actually confirms it's clean. That's the gap financial due diligence fills — not because you expect problems, but because 'I didn't find any problems' is a very different statement than 'I didn't look for any.' One of those is defensible. The other isn't.

Most growing companies outgrow their finance function before leadership realizes it. Revenue is up, headcount is up, complexity is up — but the reporting, controls, and financial visibility haven't kept pace. By the time it's obvious, you've already been flying partially blind for longer than you'd like to admit. An interim/project CFO/Controller can be the key until the right full-timer is found. Make sure it's a real accounting leader with their firm's team in support, not a marketing firm advertising as a fractionalCFO shop with a couple of accounting managers and bookkeepers.

Your company is growing fast, but your accounting team+processes aren't keeping up. That gap will cost you — in decisions made on bad data, in missed signals, in audits that surface problems you could have fixed six months earlier. The best time to close that gap was last year. The second best time is right now. The misses build up. We see searchers endure oh-so-much, whether it's costly, unforeseen liquidity crunches, crap system integrations, investors/board members unhappy with speed and quality of reporting, all of it starts with getting the accounting numbers right and communicated even better by real accounting leaders. Let us help dammit.

New QofE requirement from the SBA is fairly vague in the new SOP. Hopefully it's not a race to the bottom with a copy-paste exercise from a high volume business plans shop, which if had to make an inference, is what the SBA is trying to get away from.

Hollywell is now Numera Advisory, woohoo! And a fractional CFO and Controller from Numera is a real, tenured accounting professional, supported by our full team (Templates, ideas, guides, scaling up and down). It's not a marketing term for a firm of block-and-tackle accounting managers and a team of offshore bookkeepers. And they're not a consolation prize for companies that can't afford a full-time, seasoned executive. It's a deliberate decision to bring in senior finance leadership exactly when you need it — during a raise, an acquisition, a difficult audit — without carrying that cost year-round. It's not a workaround. It's how smart ETA and traditional search owner operators build lean, effective F&A functions, until their planned scale happens.

Deals of all sizes move fast. The market doesn't wait. Your diligence team shouldn't either. If your diligence team is asking you to wait weeks to kick off when you're thinking in days, you have the wrong partner. @Hollywellteam is Big-4 leadership led and is never the hold up. Let's go already.

Not everything's about work. But work, and especially having made a terrifying leap into entrepreneurship and founding an accounting consulting firm, made it possible for our soccer kiddo and I to attend a WC match to see the eventual champions. Time is now our most precious resource. Go take advantage of it, searchers.

The most expensive due diligence mistake isn't finding a problem. It's not finding one that was always there. Problems discovered post-close become your problems. Problems discovered pre-close become negotiating points — or reasons to walk. One of those outcomes is significantly better than the other. Let us help dammit. We're here so you can find out what you're really getting into bed with.

Your LOI is in. Your exclusivity clock is ticking. You don't need a slow, under-experienced team running a process — you need senior professionals who have been in the room before and know exactly what to look for. Speed and rigor aren't mutually exclusive. The right team gives you both. Our timeline for deals < $20M is typically soup to nuts ~4 weeks, with draft results in 2-3 weeks. We're never the hold up and we don't repeat ourselves keeping deal fatigue to a minimum. Let's go.

We've seen it more times than we can count: a business that looks like a platform acquisition turns out to be a key-man dependent lifestyle business held together by one relationship. A QofE doesn't just validate EBITDA — it reveals how the business actually works. That's information you need before close, not after.

Deal velocity matters. But not more than knowing what you're actually acquiring. The best private equity sponsors have figured out how to do both — move decisively and look hard at the numbers. That's not a contradiction. It's a competitive advantage. Sloppy diligence doesn't make you faster. It makes you wrong faster.

Skipping financial due diligence to close faster is like skipping a home inspection to close faster. You'll feel great on closing day. You'll feel much worse the first time it rains and you realize the roof has been quietly failing for three years. Speed is valuable. But not more valuable than knowing what you're buying. The horror stories we have as real diligence providers trained in the Big 4 are endless. Seriously, if not choosing @Hollywellteam that's fine just get a real list of procedures your provider says they're going to do and then make sure they actually did them and that they can explain the results.