Every listing in Acquire Scout carries a Scout Score out of 100. It exists to answer the question you'd otherwise spend an evening on a spreadsheet answering: given what this business earns, is the asking price sensible — and what would owning it actually do for me?
It is deliberately not a measure of whether you'll like the business. That's what Match % is for. Scout Score is about the deal itself, so the same listing scores the same for every buyer on the platform.
What goes into it
Four groups, each contributing to the total.
Deal economics — the biggest block. What you're paying relative to what the business earns (the SDE multiple), whether the earnings cover the loan payments (DSCR), and how long it takes to earn your down payment back.
Financial quality — is revenue growing, flat or shrinking; the margin the business runs at; and how much of the stated earnings depends on add-backs rather than real profit.
Risk profile — customer concentration, whether revenue recurs or has to be won again every month, and how much of the business walks out the door with the current owner.
Deal structure — whether the seller will carry a note, how long the lease runs, and whether the deal looks SBA-financeable.
What the price is measured against
This is the part most people assume is a fixed rule of thumb — "home services sell for about three times earnings" — and for a long time, in most tools, it is.
Ours isn't. Acquire Scout tracks thousands of live listings across the marketplaces it covers, and every week it recalculates, for each industry and deal size, what businesses like this one are actually being asked for. Your deal's multiple is then placed inside that live distribution.
Open a deal and tap the ⓘ beside its Scout Score and you'll see it: a band showing where the middle half of comparable listings sit, a marker for where this deal falls, and a line telling you exactly what the comparison is built from — how many listings, and when it was last updated.
Why a score can change on its own
Because the market it's measured against moved.
The comparison set refreshes every Monday. If asking prices across an industry drift up over a week, a deal priced at yesterday's rate becomes relatively better value — and its score ticks up slightly, even though nothing about the business changed. The reverse happens when a category cools.
So if you open a deal you looked at last week and the score reads 68 where it read 71, the usual explanation is simply that the market moved underneath it. Where that's happened you'll see it stated directly under the comparison band: median up from 2.9× last week.
Three things keep this from being noise:
It moves weekly, never mid-week
The figures update once, on Monday. A score you read on Tuesday reads the same on Friday. We deliberately don't recalculate continuously — a number that shifts under you while you're deciding is worse than a number that's a few days old.
Movement is bounded
The market comparison can only shift the benchmark so far from our own reviewed baseline in either direction. A quiet week with unusual listings in it can nudge the scale; it cannot swing your deal from Strong to Weak.
Thin data is not used at all
A comparison is only drawn when there are enough genuinely comparable listings to be meaningful. Below that threshold we fall back to our reviewed baseline for the industry and say so, rather than inventing precision out of a handful of listings.
What else moves it — and what never does
Your score changes when the deal changes or when the market moves. Nothing else touches it.
- Editing the worksheet. Correcting the asking price, entering the real SDE, setting your financing terms or answering the risk questions all recalculate the score, because you've changed what's being scored.
- Accepting figures from a diligence analysis. When you upload documents and accept the verified numbers, the score moves onto those numbers — and the ▲/▼ beside it tells you by how much. That is the single most valuable score change there is: it's the difference between the seller's claim and what their own paperwork supports.
- Your plan, your profile, or how long you've been a customer. None of these touch it. The score is a property of the deal.
Reading the number honestly
The bands are Strong Deal (80+), Viable (60–79), Weak (40–59) and Red Flag (under 40) — with one override: a hard flag, like earnings that don't cover the debt, caps the label at Red Flag however well the rest of the deal scores.
The one exception is when we don't yet trust the earnings figure the flag rests on — an unverified number from a listing, say. The flag is still raised, because it's still a real risk to check, but the label follows the score rather than asserting a verdict off a figure nobody has confirmed.
Treat it as a triage tool. A high score means the economics are worth an evening of your time; it is not a recommendation, and it cannot see the things that aren't in the documents — the owner's relationship with the top three customers, the lease renewal the landlord isn't going to grant, the key employee already interviewing elsewhere.
That is what diligence is for, and it's why the score gets sharper the moment you put a deal in your pipeline and upload the seller's actual paperwork.