Guardian Due Diligence vs DueDilio
One QoE shop, or a marketplace of providers?
Guardian Due Diligence
A quality-of-earnings boutique focused specifically on searcher-sized deals (typically under $5M enterprise value), offering QoE, QoE Lite, proof-of-cash, and deal advisory — founded in 2017 by Elliott Holland, now a 17-person team with $600M+ in transactions reviewed.
Custom pricing · Pricing not published — quote-based via a scheduling call. Third-party reviews report roughly $20–40k engagements; we could not verify those figures against a primary source, so treat them as directional only.
- Specialization is the pitch: QoE for searcher-sized, often SBA-financed deals is the entire practice
- Scale and track record: 17-person team, $600M+ in transactions since 2017
- Claims to surface most deal-breaking issues within about a week — materially faster than typical CPA-firm timelines
- No published pricing — and third-party figures ($20–40k) are significant against a sub-$2M purchase
- Marketing-forward brand (the founder styles himself 'King of QoE') — calibrate marketing claims against references
- Testimonial-heavy public reputation; ask for recent client references on deals your size
Verified Jul 10, 2026 · Full review →
DueDilio
A marketplace and concierge service that matches small-business buyers with vetted independent professionals and boutique firms for quality of earnings, legal, technical, and operational due diligence, plus pre-LOI and post-acquisition work; you describe your project and receive multiple scoped proposals within roughly 36 hours to 3 business days. Buyers pay nothing to use it — DueDilio takes a commission from the service providers it places.
Free · Free for buyers, per the vendor's own FAQ ("DueDilio is free for clients to use. Our revenue comes from the service providers in our network," homepage as captured Apr 2026; how-it-works FAQ adds it "earns revenue by taking a commission on the transactions facilitated"). No buyer-side subscription or platform fee is published; you pay only the hired provider's quoted engagement fee (DueDilio's own guides peg small-business financial DD at roughly $5k–$20k+). No dedicated pricing page exists.
- Genuinely free for buyers with no obligation to hire — you can collect competing QoE/legal/DD proposals and use them as pricing leverage even if you walk away
- Fast concierge matching: vendor commits to proposals within ~36 hours to 2–3 business days, and reviewers consistently confirm quick turnaround with founder Roman Beylin personally scoping projects
- Covers the whole deal lifecycle in one place (pre-LOI valuation and deal modeling, M&A legal, post-LOI QoE/tech/commercial diligence, post-close fractional CFO/CTO), claiming 680+ projects and 220+ vetted providers as of Apr 2026
- Commission-funded matchmaking cuts both ways: DueDilio only gets paid if you hire from its network, so provider quotes embed its cut and there's an inherent incentive to keep you in-network (one PE reviewer got good proposals but ultimately hired a cheaper local non-network firm)
- Vetting depth is the vendor's claim, not independently auditable — you are still hiring independent contractors and boutiques, and outcome quality varies by the specific provider matched
- Officially scoped to $1M–$25M transactions, so buyers of sub-$1M (and many sub-$500k SDE) businesses are below the stated sweet spot
Verified Jul 10, 2026 · Full review →
Our take
Choose Guardian when you want a practice that lives in searcher-sized deals end-to-end and you value speed of pattern recognition over price shopping.
Choose DueDilio when you want competing quotes and a menu — QoE, legal, tech diligence — matched to your deal's size rather than one firm's model.