/decisions · 2026-08-30 · investing · acquisitions

Acquisition shortlist refresh - does any of this clear the step-away number?

Refresh of the 2026-05-03 Tampa shortlist · 10 scored candidates · browser-verified 2026-08-30 except where marked

Scored - the five-factor fit test

Knowledge-work cost base · recurring contracted revenue · regulatory moat · retiring owner and clean books · family-orbit edge. Each factor 0-2, scored out of 10. SDE = Seller's Discretionary Earnings. RCM = revenue cycle management, the medical billing lane. EBITDA = earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. TJC = The Joint Commission, a healthcare accreditor.

The dental lane you asked about does not exist as a buyable funnel. Searching BizBuySell, BizQuest, businessesforsale, Venturu, DealStream and business2sell on 2026-08-30: zero confirmed Florida dental supply distributors, and roughly five to seven identifiable Florida labs total, of which the only one cleanly in band is a dead link. Trade commentary also points to an active in-state consolidator buying these shops directly, which I could not verify and am not resting the conclusion on. It also fails the fit test on merits - a lab's cost base is technicians doing physical production, not knowledge work.

The step-away number

Business cash to you after debt service and after paying a General Manager, sustained two quarters, at or above your recurring monthly living spend as Monarch shows it, plus a runway floor.

Note the test changed. The earlier version of this page measured against your take-home pay, which is an income-replacement test. This one measures against recurring spend. That swap is a second driver of what follows, independent of the decomposition itself, and it is a friendlier test.

Modeled against Monarch only. Your income and your Monarch-visible expenses. Any expense not in Monarch is assumed covered by Michelle's income and treated separately, so it does not appear anywhere below.

The General Manager band is an ESTIMATE: $105-135k base at a 1.2x employer load, built on Bureau of Labor Statistics May-2025 wage medians for the Tampa metro (General and Operations Managers $103,670; Medical and Health Services Managers $124,980; the band tops out using the 75th-percentile figures, $167,250 and $163,690). The higher band is applied only to rows that need a licensed clinical administrator, which is the provider practice, not the back-office billing shop. It is the single biggest swing factor in the table below. Debt service is modeled at 10% down, 90% financed, 10.5% over 10 years, except where a listing publishes its own terms.

Your bar, corrected: $10,900 a month of true recurring living spend, or $12,200 a month conservative. One Monarch decomposition, 2026-08-30, June-August 2026 aggregate, unreplicated against a second window. The $16,000-$19,000 this page first carried was raw Monarch outflow, and it was inflated. Raw outflow ran about $20,900 a month, and four buckets inside it are not recurring living spend.

Raw $20,900 minus $8,628 leaves about $12,300 a month on those rounded inputs; the decomposition's own conservative figure is $12,200, and the roughly $70 difference is rounding in the raw monthly average. The per-month column above is each aggregate divided by three and rounded to the dollar, so the rows sum to $8,629 while the true total is $25,884 / 3 = $8,628. $12,200 is the conservative variant because it still carries Ray Data Co business expenses mixed into Monarch (Gusto and similar, roughly $1,300 a month, taken as the residual between the two variants rather than itemized). Strip those and true recurring household spend is $10,900 a month. Note what that means: $10,900 is not a Monarch output, it is $12,200 minus a $1,300 residual that was never itemized. $12,200 is the number to trust. The best candidate here lands at $10.8k-$12.9k a month.

Two caveats stay attached to this bar. First, Monarch returned only a three-month aggregate for the window, with no per-month split, so every monthly figure above is an average and a single heavy month is invisible inside it. Second, home-improvement "one-times" are not one-time during an active build: while construction is live, bucket (a) recurs. That is not a small caveat. Bucket (a) is $4,187 of the $8,628 haircut, so half the correction rests on the one bucket the live build reinstates. Strip only buckets (b), (c) and (d) and the bar is about $15,200 a month, back inside the range this page just called inflated. Two smaller notes in the same direction: a $5,000 IRS lump is treated as one-time, but self-employment brings quarterly estimated payments, and dropping Florida Prepaid from the bar means the step-away scenario stops funding college.

One more label. The monthly column in the table above is ESTIMATE: pre-tax business cash at a single assumed 27.5% effective rate (Florida has no state income tax), not reviewed by an accountant. A single rate is used deliberately, because pairing a low rate with the high end and a high rate with the low end would imply higher income is taxed more lightly. One asymmetry to disclose: the 27.5% rate is applied only to positive cash. Negative bounds are shown pre-tax, since an operating loss does not generate a tax benefit here. That is why the two loss-making rows read -$3.3k and -$3.1k rather than -$2.4k and -$2.2k. Everything is stated monthly rather than annually.

The verdict changes, conditionally. The earlier version of this page concluded flatly that no candidate replaced your paycheck. Against the build-parked bar that is no longer true: the Palm Beach CPA practice at $10.8k-$12.9k reaches the bar at the top of its range and falls under it across the rest. That is a candidate worth a broker call, not a candidate that clears. Against the build-live bar of about $15.2k, the old conclusion still holds and nothing here clears.

Three subtractions sit outside every row above and each one alone would erase the straddle: the runway floor (still blank, modeled at zero), the benefits buyback (open-market family coverage plus the lost 401(k) match, plausibly $2k-$3k a month, not modeled), and the build-live version of the bar. Read the flip as "one candidate is now worth diligence," not as "the acquisition path ends the day job."

The second 8/10 candidate, the medical billing and revenue cycle management firm, models at $3.9k-$6.1k and misses under every version of the bar. It earns diligence on thesis fit and family edge, not on price - and its stated 87% SDE margin on $628,801 of revenue with three staff is unreconciled, so treat that row's SDE as a question, not an input.

What size would actually clear it

To clear $10.9k-$12.2k a month after tax you need roughly $180k-$202k a year of pre-tax business cash. At 3.5x SDE, 90% financed, 10.5% over 10 years, annual debt service equals 0.510 x SDE, so with a $144,000 General Manager:

SDE ~= $662k-$706k  ->  asking ~$2.3M-$2.5M  ->  down payment ~$232k-$247k

That is about 1.6x-1.7x the median candidate's earnings here and 1.7x-1.8x the median asking price (medians across the live rows, excluding the Miami row because it reports EBITDA rather than SDE, and the Pasco row because it publishes no SDE: $418,618 SDE, $1.35M ask).

The 3.5x is the load-bearing assumption, and it is unsourced. The live rows in this funnel trade anywhere from 1.18x to 4.01x SDE. Re-solve at 2.0x and the required SDE drops to about $458k, which is below the Palm Beach practice. So "you need a bigger business" is largely an artifact of the multiple, not a finding. The real reason Palm Beach works is its published SBA terms: $128,450 of annual debt service on $468,837 of SDE is 0.27x, against the 0.51x the model assumes. The mandate that follows is hunt cheap multiples and published financing, not hunt bigger businesses.

The down payment is still the binding constraint, and it does not comfortably fit. A $232k-$247k down payment consumes 73-88% of your visible cash of $285k-$320k (cash figure founder-disclosed, August 2026), before closing costs, the SBA guaranty fee, post-close working capital, and with the runway floor at zero. It is also the same cash the construction loan needs. Keep the two numbers separate: the recommended Palm Beach deal needs roughly $90k down on the implied ~$900k price, not $232k-$247k. The larger figure belongs to the hypothetical resize target.

Recommended top three

1. CPA and accounting practice, Northern Palm Beach County - 8/10

Knowledge-work 2 · recurring 2 · moat 2 · owner and books 2 · family edge 0

Revenue $688,247, SDE $468,837, seven years, two employees plus the CPA owner, selling because of downsizing, sixteen weeks of training included. A Small Business Administration (SBA) lender has already approved it at 10% down with published terms of $810,000 over 120 months at 10.00%. That is a third party staking money on the books being real, and its published debt service is 0.27x SDE against the 0.51x the model assumes elsewhere - which is the whole reason it reaches the bar. It models at $10.8k-$12.9k a month against a build-parked bar of $10.9k-$12.2k, so it touches the bar at the top of its range and sits under it across the rest.

Agents absorb: monthly close and reconciliation across 20-30 accounting clients, return prep and review queues, document chase, deadline tracking.
Next step: ask Max Crescenzi at Transworld for the published ask, and whether the buyer must be a licensed CPA.

2. Medical billing and RCM firm, behavioral health and addiction - 8/10

Knowledge-work 2 · recurring 2 · moat 1 · owner and books 1 · family edge 2

Asking $2,200,000, revenue $628,801, SDE $548,378, established 2017, three staff, owner works one to two hours a week, 21 providers on $30-70k annual contracts. Two corrections: it is listed as "Florida" with no city - the Tampa attribution came from the broker's own headquarters. And the $1.8M figure floating around is a dead listing; it was re-listed $400,000 higher.

It ties on score but fails the step-away test badly: $65k-$101k a year pre-tax, which is $3.9k-$6.1k a month after tax against a bar of $10.9k-$12.2k. It ranks here because it has the cleanest agent-absorption surface in the funnel and the strongest family edge - this is exactly Michael Holzum's world at ABA Centers.

Agents absorb: eligibility verification, prior authorization, claim scrubbing and submission, denial triage and appeals, payment posting, credentialing.
Next step: ask Website Closers why it was re-listed $400,000 higher, and reconcile the seller's "$300k+ revenue" bullet against the stated $628,801.

3. Integrated Medical and Behavioral Health Platform, Tampa - 6/10

Knowledge-work 1 · recurring 1 · moat 2 · owner and books 0 · family edge 2

Asking $600,000, SDE $244,200, 19 employees. Ranks third on cheapest entry and the same behavioral-health family edge, not on economics - it is roughly break-even after a licensed administrator.

Agents absorb: eligibility across 77-plus payer plans, prior authorization for psychiatry, scheduling and no-show prediction, telehealth coordination, billing follow-up.
Next step: one question first - is trailing-twelve revenue $2.4M or $1.1M? The listing has contradicted itself for 119 days.

Two gates

Gate 1 - the phData outside-work question. All three recommendations sit on the permitted side of your filter (healthcare admin, RCM, accounting are allowed; data, BI, and AI consultancies are banned). But none of these are passive. Owning an operating business while a Forward Deployed Engineer at a consultancy is a real conflict-of-interest question that has not been asked, and it should be asked before a Letter of Intent, not after.

Gate 2 - the home build wants the same cash. Building on the current lot rolls the $414,000 payoff (founder-disclosed, August 2026) into a construction-to-perm note of roughly $1.5M-$1.7M, taking carry to about $13-14k a month (modeled) against $4,500 today (actual). That decision is already gated on six months at target, October through March. A $232k-$247k acquisition down payment and a construction down payment still cannot both come out of $285-320k. These are one decision, not two. Worth separating what is reversible from what is not: asking a broker for a teaser costs nothing and unwinds freely. Wiring a down payment does not, and it is the step that forecloses the build. The gate sits between those two, not before the first one.

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