Main Street Diligence runs the arithmetic an acquisition analyst runs — earnings quality, leverage, debt service, break-even, hold-to-exit return — across every active Florida business listing we index, before you contact anybody. Not so that software can tell you what to buy. So that you arrive at the first call already knowing which three questions matter.
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Whoever is selling has almost certainly sold a business before, and is being advised by somebody who does it for a living. They know which numbers are load-bearing and which are decoration. They know what a lender will actually fund. They know the question you are not going to think to ask.
You get one page of seller-reported figures and a phone call.
That asymmetry is not fraud and it is not unusual — it is just what happens when a first-time buyer meets a repeat seller. It is also the only part of the problem that software can do anything about. Institutional buyers close it by putting an analyst on the deal for a week before anyone picks up the phone. This site is an attempt to hand a first-time buyer the same week of work, on every listing at once, before they have committed anything but attention.
Every listing carries a data verdict, and the top grade is checks out — which its own tooltip defines as seller-reported and unaudited; these checks test arithmetic, not truth. A listing with invented but internally consistent figures earns that grade, and that is the correct behaviour. The alternative is a badge implying a verification nobody in this market can actually perform. We would rather have a low ceiling that means something than a high one that does not.
Nothing below is locked, timed, or held behind an account. The tabs are peers and you can start anywhere — but this is the order the site is built around, and each step feeds the next.
Price, county and category, the way every listing site does it - and then the filters no listing site offers. Whether the business still earns anything after you pay a manager market rate. Whether a lender could fund it at the asking price. Whether the owner works in it or on it. Whether the financials are documents or assertions. Every option carries the count of what it would leave you, so you can read the shape of the market off the menu without clicking anything.
Open the search →The heart on a card. Your shortlist works signed out; signing in only makes it follow you to another device. And it is a workspace rather than a bin - everything you can do with a deal is offered from the shortlist, at the moment you are looking at it.
See the shortlist →Every row that separates them, with the winner marked and the gap measured - and each figure placed against the whole Florida inventory, so you can see whether a 24% return is remarkable or ordinary. Then move the weights. Cash flow now against room to grow, price against proof: the ranking re-sorts as you argue with yourself, which is the point.
Open Compare →Financing structure, debt service, break-even, total cash in, and the hold-to-exit return with the exit multiple you actually believe rather than the one in the listing. Move any input and every downstream number moves with it, so you find out which assumption the deal is really resting on.
Run the numbers →A written brief, a podcast episode and a slide deck on your shortlist, built from the same figures on the screen and required to name the gaps rather than paper over them. Read it as a list of questions for the broker, not as a recommendation.
Get a review →This is the number the site exists to be able to state. It is not a coverage claim — there are indexes with fifty times our listing count. It is what happens when you apply an acquirer’s own tests to a whole market at once, in order, each one on top of the last:
11%. That is not us being hard on Florida. It is what the inventory looks like after the test your lender is going to apply anyway, applied before you spend a week on the wrong deal rather than after. Every line above is a filter in the sidebar, and every line carries its own count, so the funnel is readable without clicking a thing.
Counted from the crawl of August 19, 2026. These figures move every week and are read from the database when this page is built — they are not typed in.
A screening tool that hides its misses is worse than no tool, because it converts an unknown into a false negative you will never go looking for. So the failures are on the listing, in public, on the card.
Right now 3 of the 1,768 listings that print earnings on both their pages print two different numbers. Some listings publish earnings larger than their asking price. Some came out of source pages whose markup was broken badly enough that the figures had to be recovered. Some quote a headline year that is older, and better, than the most recent year they publish further down. All of those are visible on the listing itself, with what to ask about each one.
A missing figure is treated differently from a wrong one, deliberately. A broker withholding the county is making a confidentiality decision about their client, not making an error — colouring that as a data problem would tell you something false about the business. Gaps are shown as gaps. Only arithmetic that cannot be reconciled is flagged as a failure.
And nothing is filtered out for failing. A listing whose numbers look impossible is sometimes a genuinely distressed sale, and hiding it would trade a visible problem for an invisible one.
We are not a broker and we are not paid by one. No broker can pay for placement, a badge or a rank, because none of those are for sale. Our scope is Florida, deliberately and only — the index covers 2,089 active listings across 53 counties, and we would rather be able to defend every figure in one state than reprint feeds from fifty.
Nothing here is legal, financial, tax or investment advice. It is arithmetic, shown with its working, so that you can take better questions to the people who do give advice.
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Published by Main Street Diligence. Screening tools for Florida business buyers. This is general information, not legal, financial or tax advice.