🎯 Deal or Dud

How to play

Every day, everyone gets the same fictional business-for-sale listing. You make two calls:

• ① Deal or Dud — is it fundamentally sound at a fair price, or do red flags make it a pass?
• ② Your price — what you'd actually pay. Scored only when it really is a deal: within ±12% of fair value earns a ⭐.

Operator cheat sheet

• Boring businesses trade at ~2–3.5× SDE (owner earnings). Self-storage and laundromats run a bit hotter; pizza and vending a bit cooler.
• Sanity-check margins: pizza 11–17%, service trades 14–25%, laundromat / car wash / vending 22–40%, self-storage 40%+. Way above that = addback abuse.
• Red flags hide in plain sight: one-time revenue bumps, dying leases, owner-is-the-business, one giant customer, "fully depreciated" equipment, fantasy multiples, unverifiable cash.
• Some scary-looking things are fine: retiring owners, ugly websites, seasonality that repeats every year.