Scope
Never Buy Blind

Know what you're really buying.

Drop in any business listing and Scope runs the numbers your lender will run: Will the loan work? Can we afford it? Is the asking price even in a fair range, and what should we verify before signing? Then it turns the whole analysis into a package your lender, CPA, and attorney will take seriously.

Analyze your first deal free Try the free calculator

Free plan: the sample walkthrough plus one real deal you enter yourself — no credit card. Having Scope read your listings and documents for you is a paid feature. Your numbers stay yours.

Desert Aire Mechanical LLC
Gilbert, AZ · HVAC Services
Financing · 1 of 6 Analytic Engines
Asking price$850,000
Seller's discretionary earnings$295,000
SDE multiple2.9× — below Scope's fair mark
Debt coverage at 10% down1.63 — clears the lender floor
Cash flow after the bank, before tax$171,130 /yr
⚠ Flagged: customer concentration 41%
0
Opportunity Score
Worth a closer look — on the seller's unverified numbers

↑ Move the deal. Every number above is live.

6 engines
financing, risk, financial health, deal readiness, opportunity, and valuation — on every deal, every plan
1,000+
industries recognized, so your business is classified the way a lender and the SBA see it
Hours saved
first-pass research on listings, bookkeeping exports, P&Ls, and tax returns can be organized and screened in seconds on paid plans
SBA head start
Form 1919 and the Personal Financial Statement, prefilled from your profile
Why Scope exists

Instinct closes bad deals. Evidence closes good ones.

Most people buy a business once in their life, usually with their life's savings. The broker across the table has done this a hundred times and works for the seller. That is not a villain, it is an information gap. Scope is how you close it.

Hours of first-pass research, compressed into seconds. Scope uses technology to read the deal materials, propose the key figures, run the screening math, and organize what deserves a closer look. You review the extracted inputs before relying on the result, then bring the important questions to your lender, CPA, and attorney.

Scope levels it. The lender math, cash flow, risk, and a price check, analyzed in minutes, in plain English, for every deal you look at, and organized the way your lender and CPA will want to see it. Not so software can decide for you. So you can look anyone at the closing table in the eye.

How it works

From listing to closing table in five moves.

1

Drop in the deal

Paste a listing or drop the broker's PDF. It's read and filed in seconds.

2

See the score

Opportunity Score and Strategic Fit tell you if this deal matches your money, skills, and county.

3

Look deeper

Financial health, risk flags, and the coverage ratio your loan officer checks first — what the lender will see, before the lender sees it.

4

Negotiate with a plan

Model SBA, seller financing, and down payments live. Walk in knowing your ceiling.

5

Close with paperwork done

LOI drafts, the banker package, and SBA forms — filled from work you already did.

See it

This is the answer you get.

Not a dashboard to interpret — a verdict, the reasoning behind it, and the next two things to do about it. Every deal, every plan.

A 66-second tour of the real product — Copper Ridge Heating & Air is the sample deal, free on every plan. No sound.
What the tour shows, in words
  1. The pipeline. Three deals in one list — Copper Ridge Heating & Air at $850,000 asking on $295,000 SDE (2.9× stated SDE), Bluebonnet Commercial Cleaning at $1,390,000, and Summit Line Auto Repair at $495,000 — each with its stage, risk flag and asking multiple.
  2. Opening a deal. Scope reads it through six engines and returns one read: the asking price, the multiple against its fair mark, the debt-service coverage a lender would compute, the monthly payment and the owner's take-home after a manager's salary.
  3. The honest verdict. Because nobody has verified the seller's figures yet, Scope withholds precise price guidance and says so — "Not enough to decide yet", with the missing tax returns, P&Ls and balance sheet named as the blocker, and requesting them as the next move.
  4. Economics. The coverage ratio a loan officer checks first, against the structure being modelled.
  5. Portfolio insights. Where the money sits across every deal, total pipeline value, and how far each one has moved by stage.
  6. Compare. Selecting two deals from the pipeline and putting them side by side.

The tour ends on the Scope mark: Never Buy Blind. Analyze your first deal free at scopegm.com. No credit card required.

What's inside

Every angle. One lens.

Everything below ships today. No "coming soon" asterisks. Negotiation Insights, the Banker Package, the LOI, and the SBA forms are on the Microscope plan. Having Scope read your listings and documents for you starts on Telescope. Everything else is on every plan, and on the free plan you can always enter the numbers yourself.

Opportunity Score

One number that blends value, risk, fit, and financing — with the "why" one click away.

Valuation Engine

A price check against rule-of-thumb SDE bands: the multiple, the earnings quality behind it, and whether the ask is even in range. A screen, not an appraisal.

Risk Detection

Customer concentration, thin margins, odd numbers — flagged with the question to ask the seller.

Scenario Planning

SBA vs. seller note vs. more down — model the payment before you promise it.

Negotiation Insights

Your walk-away number, your leverage, and the concessions that cost the seller least.

Due Diligence

A living checklist that knows what's missing, and on the paid plans it reads the documents you collect.

Banker Package

The lender's-eye story of your deal — executive summary, financials, and forms in one bundle.

SBA Forms, Auto-filled

Form 1919 and the Personal Financial Statement, filled from a profile you enter once.

Built for Main Street

Built for the trades America actually runs on.

Scope reads a typed P&L or a text PDF. Scanned paper needs your numbers typed in for now. Pick your trade to run the lender math on a deal in it.

HVACPlumbingLandscaping ConstructionManufacturingHome Services Professional ServicesTransportationRetail RestaurantsMedical & DentalCleaning Auto RepairFranchisesE-commerce
From the blog

Learn to scope a deal before you sign one.

Plain-English guides to the numbers, the risks, and the questions that decide a deal.

Start here

How to analyze a business before you buy it

The five steps that separate a real opportunity from a mirage.

 The numbers

Add-backs: how to tell legit from inflated

Every add-back moves the price by a multiple of itself.

 The risks

Red flags when buying a small business

Nine warning signs that sink more deals than everything else.

Read all the guides →

Mark and Grace, the founders of Scope
Mark & Grace — Gilbert, Arizona
Who built this

Built by a buyer, not a bank.

I'm Mark. I've spent 22 years in law enforcement. My wife Grace has owned a small business, worked in medicine, and now invests in real estate — she decided a while ago she was done working for someone else, and honestly, she got there before I did.

Scope started at our kitchen table, because buying a business is harder than it should be. Every listing shows the same three shiny numbers. Then you sign an NDA, get handed a pile of financials, and spend your nights trying to figure out what's real. Some problems are easy to spot. The expensive ones aren't.

We started using AI to speed up the analysis, and it helped — right up until every deal was scattered across our inbox, our drive, and a dozen half-finished notes, and we couldn't remember which spreadsheet went with which business. So I built the tool we kept wishing existed: one place that reads the documents, runs the numbers the way a lender will, and tells you straight what checks out and what doesn't.

We're not Wall Street people, and Scope isn't a Wall Street product. We're buyers, same as you — in the middle of our own deal right now. Grace has run a business and knows what the inside of one actually looks like. And it turns out 22 years of checking whether people's stories hold up is decent training for reading a seller's numbers.

What Scope is — and isn't

Scope is the analysis: it reads the listing and the financials, runs the lender math and a price check, flags what doesn't add up, and hands you the questions your lender, CPA, and attorney will ask anyway. It is not a lender, a CPA, or a law firm — it gets you to those people prepared, so you're paying them for judgment, not for sorting your paperwork.

When to bring in the pros

Scope the deal first, then bring in the licensed pros. Talk to an SBA lender as soon as a deal looks real — a good one will tell you for free whether the loan can work. Bring in a CPA before you bet your savings on the seller's numbers, and an attorney before you sign anything heavier than an NDA.

A real person answers

Email support@scopegm.com — it doesn't go to a ticket farm, it comes to me, and you'll hear back within one business day. Scope is a small operation on purpose: the person answering has stared at the same lender math you're looking at.

Built to be trusted with your numbers
Encrypted where it counts

Your SSN and tax IDs are encrypted at rest (AES-256). Everything moves over TLS and is isolated to your account.

Your data stays yours

Stored privately. We never use your identifiable deal materials to train any AI model, and our AI provider is contractually barred from training on what you send. See our Privacy Policy.

Plain-English terms

Binding Terms and Privacy Policy written to actually be read.

SBA-aligned math

The 7(a) guaranty fee by loan size, the rate caps, the seller-note standby rules, and the coverage ratio your loan officer checks first — following the SBA SOP 50 10 framework, with the schedule date printed on the math. Ask a chat model for these and it will guess.

Same deal, same numbers

The analysis is written-down rules, not a model guessing. The same inputs always produce the same numbers, and every figure carries the version of the rule that produced it. AI reads documents you drop in — it never touches the scoring math.

Your move

Your next business is out there.
See it clearly.

Start free and run a real deal through Scope in minutes — no credit card.

Analyze your first deal free Try the free calculator

Prefer to follow along first? Get the occasional product update — no spam.