Introducing Sourcing and Pipeline: Find Off-Market Businesses and Run Every Deal to Close
TL;DR: Accredited Pro now includes two features built to work together. Sourcing finds owner-operated small businesses that are not listed for sale yet, scores each one for acquisition fit, and gives you a grounded valuation plus owner contact so you can start the conversation directly. Pipeline saves every deal you care about, on-market or off-market, and moves it through the full acquisition process from first contact to close. Both are included with Accredited Pro at $49 per month, with a 7-day free trial.
What are Sourcing and Pipeline?
Sourcing and Pipeline are two features, now live for every Accredited Pro member, that cover the two halves of buying a small business.
Sourcing fills the top of your funnel. It finds owner-operated businesses that are not on any marketplace yet, ranks them for acquisition fit, and hands you a valuation and owner-contact details so you can reach out first.
Pipeline runs everything after that. It gives you one place to save deals, track them through every stage of a purchase, and keep your notes and financials in order so nothing slips through the cracks.
The pairing is the point. Sourcing gives you proprietary, off-market targets that other buyers are not looking at. Pipeline manages those targets, and any on-market listings you find, all the way through to close. One workflow, one subscription.
Why search for businesses that are not for sale?
Most owner-operated businesses never get listed on a marketplace. By the time a business shows up on a broker site, every other buyer sees it the same day, and you are competing on price against people who found it at the same moment you did.
The businesses that never list are a much larger pool, and they are far less picked over. The problem has always been finding them. Off-market sourcing solves that. It lets an independent searcher build a pipeline of businesses that are not for sale yet, so the first serious conversation an owner has about selling is with you.
How does Sourcing find off-market businesses?
You search the way you already think about deals, by category and location.
Search by category or keyword, for example "HVAC contractor" or "window cleaning," across a single city or an entire state. You choose between two modes:
- Traditional, for physical and service businesses that operate in a place.
- Digital, for online, content, and e-commerce businesses.
Statewide sweeps show live progress and give you a size estimate before you commit, so you know roughly how many operators a search will return before you run it. When you want to go wider, "Widen the net" expands your keywords to catch long-tail operators you would not have searched for on your own.
How does acquisition scoring work?
Every business a search returns is ranked for acquisition fit, so you start with the best candidates instead of scrolling through a raw list.
Each result shows three things: a score, a tier of A, B, or C, and a short reason. The scoring weighs signals that matter to a buyer, including growth indicators, whether the business is owner-operated, revenue signals, and recession resistance. You get a ranked shortlist and a plain reason for each ranking, so you can decide in seconds whether a name is worth a closer look.
What does a deep dive tell you?
Scoring gets you a shortlist. A deep dive is where the real research happens, and it is the difference-maker.
Run a deep dive on any single business, or run them in bulk with a live progress bar. Each deep dive surfaces:
- Founding year and years in operation.
- Owner and decision-maker details.
- Employee count and a size estimate.
- A refined acquisition score.
- A grounded valuation, explained below.
That is the profile you would normally spend hours assembling by hand, ready before you have made a single call.
How are valuations calculated?
A generic multiple applied to every business is close to useless, because a landscaping company and a software business do not sell for the same thing. Our valuations are matched to the specific subsector a business actually operates in, one of roughly 140 subsectors.
Each business is shown the SDE multiple range that its subsector actually commands, not a blended market average. A dog daycare, for example, is valued against the Dog Daycare and Boarding range, not a catch-all services number. On top of that range, you get an estimated valuation for the business itself. It is a starting point grounded in real subsector data, so your first number is defensible rather than a guess.
What can you do with a set of results?
Results are built to be worked, not just read. You can:
- Filter by rating, review count, category, and traffic to narrow a large sweep fast.
- Export the full field set to CSV, with an option to enrich records first.
- Save any business into your Pipeline with one click.
- Start the conversation directly, using the owner-contact details from the deep dive.
Sourcing hands off cleanly to the second half of the workflow, which is where Pipeline takes over.
What is the Pipeline and how does it work?
Searchers lose deals in the gaps. Listings live in one inbox, off-market names live in a spreadsheet, broker follow-ups live in another thread, and no single place shows you the whole process. Pipeline is that single place.
Here is what it does:
- Save any deal with one click, whether it is an on-market listing or an off-market business you sourced.
- Move every deal through a default 15-stage flow that mirrors a real acquisition: Watching, Contacted, NDA, CIM and financials received, intro meeting, LOI sent, LOI signed, diligence, quality of earnings, financing, purchase agreement, signed, and closed or passed. You can add your own custom stages.
- Organize deals into lists, grouped by stage or by deal type, so on-market and off-market pipelines stay separate.
- Keep private notes on every deal for diligence questions, broker follow-ups, or your own analysis, with an expandable overview for the full picture.
- Manually add a deal you found anywhere, with financials like asking price, revenue, and SDE, and attach files to any deal.
- Run deep dives on off-market deals directly from the pipeline, and export to CSV whenever you need the data elsewhere.
On-market versus off-market: what is the difference?
| On-market listings | Off-market sourcing | |
|---|---|---|
| Where they come from | Broker marketplaces | Direct discovery of operating businesses |
| Who else sees them | Every other buyer, same day | You reach the owner first |
| For sale right now? | Yes | Not yet |
| Owner contact | Through a broker | Direct |
| Starting valuation | Asking price set by the seller | Grounded estimate by subsector |
| Where it lives in Accredited | Saved to Pipeline | Sourced, then saved to Pipeline |
A real example: window cleaning near Bend
Say you want a service business in Central Oregon. You run a Traditional search for "window cleaning near Bend." Sourcing returns the operators in the area, each with a score, a tier, and a reason. You sort to the A-tier names, run deep dives on the top handful, and get founding years, owners, size estimates, and a valuation matched to the window-cleaning subsector rather than a generic services multiple. You save the two strongest to your Pipeline, drop in a note about who to contact and why, and move them to Contacted the moment you send your first letter. The same flow works for a "dog daycare" search, or any category in any market you want to buy in.
How much does it cost, and how do credits work?
Accredited Pro is $49 per month and includes both Sourcing and Pipeline. There is a 7-day free trial.
Sourcing runs on credits. One credit sources a business record, and a deep dive costs 30 credits. Your free trial includes 300 credits to start. Accredited Pro includes a monthly credit grant of 1,800 credits, and heavier users can add 600-credit blocks as needed.
Who is this built for?
Sourcing and Pipeline are built for independent searchers and self-funded acquirers, the people doing the buying themselves. This is not enterprise M&A software with a login you share across a deal team. It is a tool for finding proprietary, off-market targets, valuing them, and running them to close, on one subscription.
Frequently asked questions
What is off-market business sourcing? Off-market sourcing is the practice of finding operating businesses that are not listed for sale on any marketplace, then reaching out to the owner directly. Accredited Sourcing does this by searching for owner-operated businesses by category and location, scoring each one for acquisition fit, and providing a valuation and owner-contact details.
How is Accredited Sourcing different from a business-for-sale marketplace? A marketplace only shows you businesses that are already listed, which every other buyer sees at the same time. Sourcing finds businesses that are not for sale yet, so you can start the conversation before there is any competition.
How does acquisition scoring work? Each business returned by a search is ranked for acquisition fit and shown a score, a tier of A, B, or C, and a short reason. The ranking weighs signals such as growth indicators, owner-operation, revenue signals, and recession resistance.
How are the valuations calculated? Each business is matched to one of roughly 140 industry subsectors and shown the SDE multiple range that subsector actually commands, plus an estimated valuation. Values are grounded estimates meant as a starting point, not offers or guarantees.
Can I add deals I found somewhere else? Yes. You can manually add any deal to your Pipeline, including on-market listings, with financials like asking price, revenue, and SDE, and attach files to it.
How much does Accredited Pro cost? Accredited Pro is $49 per month and includes both Sourcing and Pipeline. There is a 7-day free trial.
How do credits work? One credit sources a business record and a deep dive costs 30 credits. The trial includes 300 credits, Accredited Pro includes 1,800 credits per month, and you can add 600-credit blocks if you need more.
Who is Accredited Pro for? It is built for independent searchers and self-funded acquirers buying owner-operated small businesses, not enterprise M&A teams.
Disclaimer
Accredited is a product of ImpactLabs Ventures LLC. Scores, valuations, and estimates are informational research tools, not offers to buy or sell, appraisals, or guarantees of value, sale price, or outcome. Owner and business details are estimates and should be independently verified. Always conduct your own due diligence before pursuing or closing any transaction.
Ready to find your next deal before anyone else does? Start your 7-day free trial of Accredited Pro.