Shortlist Refresh, Scored — 2026-10-01

Three of ten prior candidates delisted in 32 days and the top-ranked one is among them; the apparent "re-price" on it was a stale search-index artifact, not a real change. The month's only genuinely new high-fit target is a Broward dental and orthodontic supply distributor, which scores 8/10 and is the dental-supply lane's first real candidate in the history of this funnel, but its cash flow cannot carry an absentee general manager at the asking price.

First full re-scan under /acquisition-rescan. Baseline is the 2026-08-30 scored roster, 32 days old. The 2026-09-01 note was a deliberate 2-day abbreviated run and is superseded here along with the 2026-08-30 note.

Acronyms, expanded once: CPA certified public accountant; RCM revenue cycle management; SBA US Small Business Administration; SDE Seller's Discretionary Earnings; EBITDA earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization; GM general manager; TJC The Joint Commission; MA Medicare Advantage; CAD-CAM computer-aided design / computer-aided manufacturing; LOI letter of intent; FDLA Florida Dental Laboratory Association.

Diff vs 2026-08-30

Prior scored roster was 10 ranked rows. Every one was re-checked in a Playwright browser session this run.

DECAYED (3 of 10 = 30%)

NEWLY IMPAIRED (1)

This is the roster's highest-quality verified earnings and it is going under offer. If the founder wants a backup position, this is the time-sensitive item of the month.

RE-PRICED (0 confirmed)

No prior row changed asking price or earnings on a browser-rendered page. Two apparent re-prices were investigated and both dissolved:

• Prior rank 1 is the important one. Stale search snippets now describe asking $900,000 explicit, revenue $641,663 and cash flow $389,036 against the same internal broker ref #6401829634 from the prior roster — which would read as a material markdown and an SDE restatement down from $468,837. The page 404s. Nothing was rendered. Treated as a stale-index artifact, not a re-price. LOW confidence, recorded only so the next run does not rediscover it as news.
• Central Florida machine shop appears at Winter Garden $1,600,000 and Winter Park $2,050,000 on identical revenue ($1,140,265). One business, two postings. Counted once; not a re-price.

UNCHANGED AND LIVE (6 of 10), browser-verified this run

Decay rate, and a recommendation to tighten the shelf-life rule

30% of the roster delisted in 32 days; 40% impaired counting the pending offer.

The 2026-08-30 baseline was 60% over 119 days. Crudely linearised that is ~0.50% per day; this month ran ~0.94% per day, roughly 1.9x the baseline rate. Caveat that matters: n=10, so one row moves the figure 10 percentage points, and a single month is not a trend.

Still, if 30% per month holds, a roster is ~51% dead at two months (0.70^2). That argues the 2026-08-30 "older than ~90 days is a lane map, not a target list" rule is too generous — the working figure should be ~60 days. Flagging as a proposed amendment, not applying it unilaterally.

Scored roster — 2026-10-01

Scored on the corrected 5-point test (axis 1 = agent/automation leverage on the cost base, including digitisable physical production; axis 2 = recurring contracted revenue; axis 3 = regulatory or accreditation moat; axis 4 = retiring owner-operator, weak tech, clean books; axis 5 = family-orbit edge from the healthcare-operations brothers-in-law).

Confidence: no NEW candidate below was browser-verified. The browser session this run was spent on prior-roster liveness, which is where the decision risk sits. Every NEW row is MEDIUM (search-snippet) and must be browser-confirmed before a broker call.

Out of band, logged not scored: Tampa business-to-business home-services lead-gen agency, $2,675,000 / SDE $713,790 / rev $1,158,441, 100% recurring, 269 clients, 35% year-over-year growth — SDE above the $600k ceiling. Volusia County digital dental lab with lab condo, $460,000 / SDE $84,861 — below the $150k floor, but it is a genuine CAD-CAM and 3D-printing operation with real estate attached. Tampa/Orlando CPA firm (Poe Group FL2006), cash flow $665,000, above ceiling, and it renders at two conflicting asks ($1,450,000 and $750,000) across channels — do not quote either.

Per-lane notes

Bookkeeping / CPA — funnel recycled, and its snippet data is the least trustworthy in the funnel

Both of the lane's prior rows delisted (ranks 1 and 6). Four genuinely new in-band rows appeared, all mid-band Palm Beach and Naples brick-and-mortar practices rather than remote-operable firms. The virtual sub-lane is now effectively empty. Buyer-licence gates are almost never stated on index pages — assume a CPA-licence or licensed-partner structure is required on anything titled "CPA practice" until a detail page says otherwise; the two pure-bookkeeping rows (16, and the dead rank 6) are the least likely to carry one. Accounting Practice Sales lists 232 Florida entries priced at ~1.0x gross on a formula with no cash flow disclosed on any of them — a lead source, not 232 underwritable targets, and it is the one channel that does state licence requirements per listing (nearly all marked "CPA"). Templated postings excluded: a Tallahassee pair with identical revenue and price band under one broker, a Tampa "CPA-Advisory Platform" title stem appearing at both $7,000,000 and $150,000, and the Poe Group "CP" virtual series sharing boilerplate margins.

Home health / RCM — deepest lane, and where the only bar-clearing candidate sits

RCM is the real inventory; home health is mostly licence shells, franchise-resale templates, or sub-$150k SDE. Excluded as non-operating certification vehicles: Hollywood FL home health agency licence $250,000, Region 5 Pasco/Pinellas Medicare licence $195,000, and a Southeast FL agency at $300,000 on under $50,000 of revenue. The standing warning holds: treat any Florida senior-care count as inflated. An Orlando franchise-resale cluster of four near-identical non-medical home-care postings is one broker template, all below the SDE floor anyway. Several rows carry stale earnings claims — rank 3 above on 2023 figures, rank 7 on 2021 — so the age of the earnings claim is the first thing to confirm, not the multiple. Accreditation is the scarce attribute rather than price: only two candidates carry Medicare + TJC, and both are Tampa-metro.

Vertical agency — stocked, but thin on the thing that matters

Of roughly 32 Florida marketing listings, only four state a verifiable contracted-recurring structure, and only one (rank 20, two-year minimum terms) states actual contract length. "Monthly recurring" in agency listings usually means month-to-month. Owner-as-primary-salesperson is almost universally undisclosed; the one listing that states it (rank 28) says yes. Assume yes until a listing proves otherwise, and make it question one on every broker call. Zero movement month over month on all three carryovers: no price cuts, no withdrawals. Combined with the SBA-pre-qualified churn pattern, these brokers appear to re-list rather than re-price. Pricing discipline is poor at the top of the band, with asks at 3.7x–4.3x SDE against the 2x–2.5x these typically transact at. Excluded under the employer conflict filter: an AI-agent-automation consultancy and an insurance-agent software product.

Dental supply / services — the lane produced its first real candidate, and one channel should be retired

Last month this lane was zero. It is now one, and that one corroborates across three marketplaces at the same $750,000, which is a real improvement over the prior scan's two ghost listings. Quantified thinness across 12 channels: BizBuySell Florida dental is ~20 listings, all clinical practices, zero supply or service; BizQuest Florida Medical Equipment & Supplies is 34–35 listings of which exactly one is dental; business2sell Florida health/medical is 12 listings with zero dental supply or service. Dental billing, dental staffing and dental practice-management produced zero Florida listings in any channel — those sub-segments appear not to transact through marketplaces at this size.

Proposed harness change: demote the dental-specific brokers (Henry Schein Professional Practice Transitions, Professional Transition Strategies, Menlo, US Dental Transitions, ddsmatch, Paragon) from "channel" to "noise." They carry only clinical practices, which are out of scope on the dentist-ownership requirement, and they are structurally the wrong channel rather than merely empty this month. Direct outreach stays primary: Sunbiz entity search on wholesale medical/dental equipment, Florida-domiciled, filed 10+ years, plus the handpiece-repair franchise networks whose retiring franchisees surface at $50k–$500k and mostly never list.

AI-hardware — the sourcing gap is closed, and the dental sub-segment now has a verified competing bidder

The prior scan's zero-count on sub-segments (b) and (c) is resolved. In-band Florida counts this run: (a) dental labs ~5, confirming the prior "5–7 statewide" estimate and still structurally thin; (b) job shops / machining / fabrication 8–10, more numerous than dental but not abundant, and only one (rank 8) is Tampa-metro; (c) print and sign ~18–20 distinct non-franchise in-band, the deepest sub-segment by a wide margin. Four franchise-development templates inflate raw counts and are not operating businesses: Big Frog Custom T-Shirts, OCC Apparel, Mess Hall and FibRenew, each cloned per metro at identical economics.

The 2026-08-30 reference comp (St. Petersburg dental lab, $525,000 / SDE $245,532) remains stale: indexed as BizBuySell 2169267 with a lease expiry of 2026-05-01 consistent with an exit, no live page recoverable, and nothing resembling it has reappeared under a new ID.

The dental-lab consolidator: claim verified, threat level lower than it first reads

The 2026-08-30 note recorded an unverified lead that an in-state consolidator was buying Florida dental labs directly. The consolidator is real. Its capacity to outbid is doubtful. Primary sources read directly this run:

• Standard Dental Labs Inc. (OTCQB: TUTH) is an explicit Florida dental-laboratory roll-up.
• 2025-09-25 (PR Newswire): signed "five non-binding letters of intent (LOIs) to acquire privately-owned, Florida-based dental laboratories" and is "in active discussions with over 20 additional independent dental laboratory owners across Florida," targeting "approximately $20 million annualized revenue run-rate by the end of 2025."
• 2026-05-07 (GlobeNewswire 3290182): closed the acquisition of BRLIT Dental Laboratory of Sarasota (founded 1977, third-generation family-owned), effective 2026-05-06, adding ~$886,000 of annual revenue to a base of ~$236,000 for a >375% increase.
• 2026-06-26 (GlobeNewswire 3318200): signed a non-binding LOI for a further established lab in the Tampa Bay region; target identity confidential.
• 2026-07-21 (GlobeNewswire 3330431): announced an acquisition-capital strategy for the next phase of Florida expansion.
• 2026-09-29 (semiannual report): "management estimates companywide annualized revenue of approximately $822,000," and the company "continues to require additional capital to support operations and execute its acquisition strategy."

Two things follow, and they point in opposite directions. It is a live competing bidder in the exact target geography, holding an LOI on a Tampa Bay lab right now, and it can tie sellers up in exclusivity. But it is a capital-constrained microcap that set itself a $20M run-rate target for end-2025 and reports ~$822,000 nine months later, missing by roughly 95%. Its own figures also fail to reconcile: ~$1.1M annualized claimed in May 2026 against ~$822,000 reported in September 2026.

Read: this raises the odds that a given Florida lab is already under an LOI, and lowers the odds of being outbid on price. It does not justify abandoning sub-segment (a). Correction to the 2026-08-30 note's framing is not needed — that note correctly labelled the claim unverified; this run resolves it.

Step-away math — top 3

Conventions carried verbatim from the 2026-08-30 note so the series stays comparable: SBA 7(a) at 10% down, 90% financed, 10-year amortisation, 10.5% assumed interest (ESTIMATE, prime not sourced); debt service $16,192/yr per $100k borrowed; GM fully loaded $126k–$162k for a non-clinical back office, $150k–$196k where a licensed clinical administrator is required; positive cash taxed at a single assumed 27.5% effective rate; negative bounds shown pre-tax. Working capital, capital expenditure and taxes on the business are not modeled; the benefits buyback (plausibly $2,000–$3,000/month) is not modeled; the household runway floor runs at zero.

Bars: $12,200/month build-parked (the number to trust; $10,900 is that figure minus an unitemised $1,300 residual) and ~$15,200/month build-live.

Validation check: re-running the model on the carryover RCM firm reproduces the prior note's $3.9k–$6.1k/month to within rounding, so the conventions are being applied consistently.

The two findings here are in tension, and neither is comfortable.

The Broward distributor is the month's best fit score and by far the most affordable entry — $75,000 of down payment against $285,000–$320,000 of visible cash, the only top candidate this funnel has ever produced that does not strain the balance sheet. But $208,227 of cash flow cannot carry both debt service and an absentee general manager. It goes negative on either end of the GM band. It is an owner-operator job at this price, not a step-away asset. That is not a reason to drop it; it is a reason to be precise about what buying it would mean.

The Tampa Bay billing and coding firm is the first candidate in this series to clear the build-live bar, and it clears on either reading of its earnings. Two cautions. Its $853,349 is labeled EBITDA, not SDE, and EBITDA is normally struck after management compensation, so subtracting a GM may double-count; the range above spans both readings ($27.3k/month if the figure is already post-management, $17.6k–$19.7k if a GM is subtracted anyway). More seriously, the figures are 2023, three years stale, and the $275,000 down payment consumes 86–96% of visible cash before closing costs, the SBA guaranty fee, post-close working capital and a runway floor still set at zero. It clears the income bar and fails the cash-feasibility test — the same wall the 2026-08-30 note hit on its required-size solve.

The carryover RCM firm remains the best-verified earnings on the board and still does not clear either bar. It is also now PENDING.

Still blank, carried from 2026-08-30: the household runway floor — months of Monarch-visible cash to hold before any step-away is safe. The model runs at zero because that number has never been set.

Reconciliation item: the $285,000–$320,000 visible-cash figure is founder-disclosed from August 2026 and is now two months old. It was deliberately not re-based against Monarch this run, because changing the cash basis mid-series would break month-over-month comparability. Worth a deliberate refresh, as its own decision.

Methodology and confidence

The month's most reusable finding is a verification one. Two prior rows (ranks 1 and 6) had search engines still serving full financials — asking price, revenue, cash flow — for pages that return hard 404s. A snippet-only sweep this month would have reported the top-ranked candidate as live and re-priced. It is gone. This is the standing argument for browser-only verification on this roster, and it now has two concrete instances behind it.

Browser access was materially better this run than the permanent-403 constraint implies: Playwright got clean renders on businessesforsale.com detail pages, bizbuysell.com, bizquest.com and websiteclosers.com, with no 403s or bot walls anywhere. Two slug-tolerance guards were established — BizBuySell and Website Closers both redirect an arbitrary /x/ slug to the canonical URL — which is what makes the 404s in the DECAYED table genuine delistings rather than URL artifacts. The 403 constraint applies to programmatic fetch (WebFetch, curl with a user agent), not to the browser. Only business2sell returned 200 to plain fetch in the dental lane.

Confidence labels used above: HIGH = browser-rendered this run; MEDIUM = search snippet; LOW = listing-card field absent, contradictory across mirrors, or inferred.

Known weakness in this run: no NEW candidate was browser-verified. The browser budget went to prior-roster liveness, which is where decision risk concentrated, but it means all 20-odd new rows are snippet-grade. The highest-value browser work next run is confirming ranks 1, 3 and 4 of the new roster, plus the state of the unconfirmed dental lab (rank 5).

Inferences explicitly not promoted to fact: that Website Closers 119279 is a relist of the dead 118226 (the 2026-09-01 note already downgraded this; nothing rendered this run links them); that BizBuySell 3987885 and WC 4081 are the same business; that the delisted Pasco agency sold rather than withdrew; that prior rank 1's snippet figures describe the same listing despite the matching broker ref.

Figure to challenge rather than accept: the behavioral-health RCM listing claims "85% Net Margin" while its own rendered numbers give 548,378 / 628,801 = 87.2%, and the denominator is labeled "Gross Income" rather than revenue. An 85–87% "net margin" on a labeled-gross denominator is a definitional problem, not a margin.

Next diligence steps — founder-executed, no autonomous outreach

Ranked by what the month actually changed.

1. Behavioral-health RCM, if a backup position is wanted — time-sensitive. It went PENDING this month. Ask Website Closers whether backup offers are being taken on WC 4081, and separately get the margin definition reconciled (85% claimed, 87.2% arithmetic, on a "Gross Income" denominator).
2. Broward dental & orthodontic supply distributor — the month's new lead. Browser-confirm the listing, then ask Transworld South Florida for the cash-flow basis and the $330,000 furniture-fixtures-and-equipment figure, which looks high for a distributor against $10,000 of inventory. The honest framing to hold going in: at $750,000 this supports an owner-operator, not an absentee GM.
3. Tampa Bay medical billing & coding — the only bar-clearing candidate. Ask Legacy Venture Group for 2025 and trailing-twelve financials; the published figures are 2023. Ask whether $853,349 is struck before or after management compensation, which decides whether a GM double-counts.
4. Hillsborough County Medicare + TJC home health. Before anything else, get one reconciled price and one reconciled cash-flow figure. It currently renders at three asks and three incompatible earnings, one of which appears to be a field-swap. Medicare certification plus TJC plus 12 executed MA contracts is the scarcest attribute in the funnel, so it is worth the call despite the data mess.
5. Integrated Medical & Behavioral Health Platform. The $2.4M-versus-$1.1M revenue contradiction has now sat unresolved on a live listing for 151 days. Same single question as in May and August. Five months of it not being fixed is itself the answer about how this seller keeps books.
6. Dental lab BizQuest BW2277954. Confirm the state before any other work. The whole 8/10 score rests on it being Florida, and the detail page 403s to fetch.

RDCO mapping

This funnel sits outside the dormant-RDCO perimeter. The founder's 2026-09-23 ruling treats Ray Data Co as dead unless a side bet earns, and the active ambition is a healthier-margin problem plus network in healthcare and life sciences. An operating-business acquisition is a different instrument from RDCO services, and three of the five lanes here are healthcare-adjacent, so the funnel is not obviously off-thesis. But nothing in the vault records the founder re-affirming this funnel since the 2026-08-30 greenlight. Worth one explicit confirmation that a monthly scan is still wanted, rather than assuming it from the cron entry.

The two gates are unchanged and deliberately not re-argued here: Gate 1, the phData outside-work conflict-of-interest question, which should be asked before an LOI rather than after; Gate 2, the home build competing for the same cash, where an acquisition down payment and a construction down payment cannot both come out of $285,000–$320,000. See the "Two gates" section of [[2026-08-30-shortlist-refresh-scored]]. Gate 2 bites harder this month, not less: the only candidate that clears the income bar needs 86–96% of visible cash.

Proposed amendments surfaced by this run, none applied unilaterally: tighten the shelf-life rule from ~90 days to ~60; demote dental-specific brokers from channel to noise; set the household runway floor.

Related

• [[2026-08-30-shortlist-refresh-scored]] — superseded; retains the step-away model derivation and the Two gates section
• [[2026-09-01-shortlist-liveness-check]] — superseded; the 2-day abbreviated run
• [[2026-08-30-pre-market-outreach-channel-plan]] — direct-outreach channel for the thin lanes (dental supply, dental labs)
• [[2026-05-03-tampa-target-shortlist]] — retained for the decay baseline