Acquisitions — Center of
Excellence

This is a discipline, not a shopping list. A target earns a look by clearing a written thesis — the same bar every time — before price, story, or broker enthusiasm enters the room. The point is to say no quickly and to know exactly why the few that survive are worth the diligence.

The thesis

Six criteria define a business worth owning. A deal doesn't need a perfect score — but it has to clear the non-negotiables (recurring revenue, a team that runs without the founder) and the price has to respect the multiple.

1. Recurring revenue · target ≥ 70% retained / subscription

   Revenue that renews itself is the asset. One-off project income re-sells every month and doesn't transfer with the sale.

2. Price discipline · ≤ 3.5× adjusted SDE

   The multiple is the margin of safety. Pay for proven earnings, not for the seller's projection of them.

3. Low founder dependence · an operating team already runs it

   If the business is the founder, there's nothing to buy. The team, process, and client relationships have to survive the handover.

4. Real profitability · SDE margin ≥ 25%

   Margin is resilience. A thin-margin business has no room to absorb a lost client, a price war, or a bad quarter.

5. Right size · SDE roughly $400K–$1.5M

   Big enough to afford a team and matter; small enough to buy without betting the whole table on one deal.

6. Strategic adjacency · it compounds something we already do

   The best acquisitions plug into an existing capability — design, creative, portfolio operations — rather than starting a new one cold.

Draft thesis (v0). These criteria and thresholds are a first pass drawn from the kind of deals coming inbound — tune the numbers and the non-negotiables to how you actually want to buy, and the scorecard follows.

Four ways in

The thesis above, the scorecard that applies it, the live pipeline, and the diligence that follows once a deal clears.