Most CPAs come in for a piece of the deal and then disappear. We don’t work that way. We’ve been the buyer ourselves, so we know how much falls apart in the gap between closing and your first month of operations. Our job is to make sure nothing falls into that gap. Here’s what working with us looks like at every stage.
We pressure-test the numbers and help you build an LOI that protects you on price, structure, and contingencies.
Our QoE Lite gives you the same core protection at a fraction of the cost so you walk into the next negotiation knowing exactly what you’re buying.
Asset deal or stock deal, LLC or S-Corp, F-reorg or rollover equity. How the deal is structured can swing your tax bill significantly, and these decisions can get locked in at signing.
Most sellers hand you a chart of accounts that hasn’t been touched in a decade and a payroll system you can’t log into. We help rebuild it from the ground up so you have a real operating system instead of a hand-me-down.
Many buyers overlook this. An appropriate PPA and OBS is key to saving tax and also keeping things clean for when you operate and (eventually) sell.
Clean bookkeeping every month, AP and AR moving on schedule, and reports that tell you what’s actually happening.
We build a forward-looking cash flow forecast so you can see what’s coming 13 weeks out, plus a CFO in your corner for the bigger calls on pricing, hiring, and growth bets.
Tax planning isn’t something you do in April. We do it throughout the year, looking at entity moves, depreciation strategy, retirement contributions, owner comp, and credits you might not know exist so you keep more of what the business earns.
We pressure-test the numbers and help you build an LOI that protects you on price, structure, and contingencies.
Our QoE Lite gives you the same core protection at a fraction of the cost so you walk into the next negotiation knowing exactly what you’re buying.
Asset deal or stock deal, LLC or S-Corp, F-reorg or rollover equity. How the deal is structured can swing your tax bill significantly, and these decisions can get locked in at signing.
Most sellers hand you a chart of accounts that hasn’t been touched in a decade and a payroll system you can’t log into. We help rebuild it from the ground up so you have a real operating system instead of a hand-me-down.
Many buyers overlook this. An appropriate PPA and OBS is key to saving tax and also keeping things clean for when you operate and (eventually) sell.
We build a forward-looking cash flow forecast so you can see what’s coming 13 weeks out, plus a CFO in your corner for the bigger calls on pricing, hiring, and growth bets.
Clean bookkeeping every month, AP and AR moving on schedule, and reports that tell you what’s actually happening.
Tax planning isn’t something you do in April. We do it throughout the year, looking at entity moves, depreciation strategy, retirement contributions, owner comp, and credits you might not know exist so you keep more of what the business earns.
Whether you’re making your first acquisition or your tenth, we’ve been there. Let’s talk.
Acquisition Calendly BookingDarin has sat on both sides of the closing table, as the CPA structuring the deal and as the buyer who had to operate the business the morning after.
He started at Ernst & Young, then spent a decade at Big 4 and boutique firms working with clients in a range of industries before founding Ashford Sky. Along the way, he bought an e-commerce business, ran it for three years, and sold it. So he knows the full arc firsthand: messy diligence, the post-close scramble to clean up books and stand up a tech stack, and what it actually takes to exit cleanly.
That’s the experience he built Ashford Sky around. At every step of a deal, the firm has the same job: save you money, take headaches off your plate, and free you up to operate. During diligence, that’s catching QofE adjustments. At close, it’s structuring the deal so tax doesn’t eat what you negotiated. After close, it’s keeping the books clean, the tax planning continuous, the tech stack working, and a CFO in your corner so you can run on data, not gut feel.
Whether you’re leaving a W2 to buy your first business, or you’re three deals deep and need a CPA team that actually speaks the language, that’s the seat Ashford Sky fills.
We’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. Book a free consultation and we’ll help you understand exactly what you’re getting into before you sign, and exactly what to do after you do.
Related Service
A lean Quality of Earnings report at a fraction of the price. Three things included, one fixed fee. Built for $500K to $5M deals.
See What's Included in QoE LiteCommon Questions
An acquisition entrepreneur is someone who buys an existing small business rather than starting one. The path is often called Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) or a search fund. Typical buyers are MBA grads, corporate executives, or first-time operators acquiring a profitable $1M to $15M revenue business with SBA financing, seller financing, or a search fund structure.
Before. The cheapest time to catch a structure problem or earnings issue is pre-LOI, while you can still re-trade or walk away. By the time the LOI is signed, you have committed to a price and structure that is harder to unwind. We offer a Quality of Earnings Lite engagement built specifically for the pre-LOI window.
Traditional CPAs are built for steady-state operating businesses. They are great at compliance work after the deal closes but they typically have not been the buyer themselves and they price their diligence work for $20M+ enterprise deals. An ETA CPA understands the SBA financing side, the search fund structure, the rollover equity questions, and the post-close 90-day cleanup the way only someone who has actually closed a deal can.
Three workstreams: Quality of Earnings (verifying adjusted EBITDA, working capital target, and balance sheet quality), Tax Structuring (asset vs stock sale, rollover equity, entity setup, purchase price allocation), and Financial Roadmap (post-close accounting architecture, reporting cadence, KPIs). All three should be in motion before the closing date.
Cutover accounting (close out the seller's books, open the buyer's), purchase price accounting (allocating the deal price across asset categories), payroll and Billpay setup, opening AR and AP, first month's close, and first quarterly tax estimate. Most buyers discover their cash feels tighter than the model showed; getting the new books accurate in the first 90 days surfaces why.
Purchase price accounting (PPA) is how you allocate the price you paid for a business across the asset categories you bought: working capital, fixed assets, intangibles, goodwill. The allocation drives depreciation, amortization, and the buyer's tax basis for years afterward. Getting it wrong costs real tax dollars. Getting it right is one of the highest-ROI advisory items in the first 90 days.
