About Accredited
Accredited exists because buying a business shouldn't require ten browser tabs and a spreadsheet you rebuilt three times.
Why we built this
We started Accredited for ourselves. We were actively looking to acquire cash-flowing, owner-operated businesses, and the sourcing process was a mess. Listings scattered across marketplaces. The same business posted three times under three different descriptions. The good ones gone before you saw them. No clean way to compare a $1.2M HVAC company in Ohio against a $900K landscaping business in Texas. No system to track what we had reached out to and what went cold.
Off-market was worse. Everyone tells you the best deals never hit a listing site, and they're right, but nobody tells you what that actually costs you. It meant pulling business lists from four different sources, cross-referencing them against state registries, hunting down an owner's contact info one business at a time, and mail-merging letters that half the time went to an address the company left in 2019. Weeks of work to build a list you could actually contact. We did it anyway, because that's where the deals were. We just hated every hour of it.
So we built the tool we wanted, for both sides of the problem. Then we opened it up.
Who's behind it
Accredited is built by Ben Sampson and Andy VandenBerg.
We've spent the last fourteen years building, buying, and investing in businesses. We founded WeHero and sold it. We've exited several other ventures and acquired a range of businesses along the way. Between us we've evaluated well over 5,000 deals, which is how we learned exactly how broken the sourcing process is and why we finally stopped complaining about it and built something.
We're still active buyers. Everything in Accredited is a tool we use ourselves.
What we do
Five days a week, we send one vetted Deal of the Day to accredited investors. No noise, no filler, one business worth your attention.
Behind the newsletter sits the platform. We pull listings from 12 marketplaces and collapse the duplicates, which turns roughly 130,000 raw listings into about 65,000 real businesses. That deduplication is the part nobody else does, and it's the difference between browsing a feed and actually seeing the market. On top of that: comps and benchmarking, deal analysis, off-market sourcing that skips the six weeks of list-building, and a pipeline that tracks every conversation from first contact to close.
Who this is for
Operators buying a business to run it. Investors buying cash flow they don't want to manage day to day. Searchers who have been at it for eight months and are tired of losing to whoever refreshed the page first.
If you're accredited and you're serious about owning something, you're who we built this for.
Now go find something worth owning.
Happy deal hunting.