I've been doing this long enough to have watched people buy great businesses and run them into the ground, and watched people buy mediocre ones and build something worth a lot more than they paid. They variable is almost never the deal. It's the operator. ^redacted‌ and I recorded an episode with ^redacted‌ on this. Adam's been a searcher, operator, and now investor, so he's watched the same searchers from 3 different vantages. His take on assessing operator quality before writing a check was the most useful part for me. He looks at how someone communicates during the search process and treats that as a proxy for how they'll handle customers and employees post close. He also had a point I've been chewing on since. A lot of buyers would be better off owning less of something bigger and properly capitalized than owning all of something small and starved for cash. Curious how others here evaluate this in themselves. If you are mid-search, how do you honestly assess whether you can operate what you're trying to buy?