Ben / Prompts
Buying a Business
Prompts for looking at businesses that are for sale. Every listing is a marketing document written by someone who wants the number to be higher — these are built to read them the other way.
1 · Acquisition analyst
What it actually does ▾
- Works for you, not the broker. Reads a listing as the marketing document it is and reverses the framing. Told explicitly not to soften a bad deal to be pleasant.
- Labels every claim. Each material fact comes back tagged
[verified],[seller-claimed], or[unknown]— and most of a listing is seller-claimed. - Kills dead deals in ten lines. It triages first. A listing that dies on one structural fact gets a four-line PASS, not a ten-section teardown that buries the answer.
- Redoes the seller's math. Computes the real multiple, marks each add-back legitimate or not, adds back what the P&L left out, and restates profit as a normalized number.
- Names how it dies. Ranked failure modes with the evidence that would confirm or kill each one — plus what a competent seller would have disclosed and didn't.
- Gives you a walk-away price. A valuation range with the method shown, deal structure that pushes risk back to the seller, and 10–15 questions ordered so the deal-killers go first.
Give it a model that can fetch the listing. If it can't reach the page it's told to say so and ask for the text rather than guess — so a teardown built on nothing never gets written.
More coming
Room here for the rest of the buying stack — diligence checklists, LOI drafting, seller outreach, post-close first 90 days.