A Deavo.ai × Treadstone Associates initiative
The Acquisition Index
A longitudinal record of what Canadian small and medium businesses are listed for, how long they stay on the market, and how many leave without ever selling. Nobody publishes the last of those, and it is the number a seller most wants.
Why this exists
Canadian small-business transaction data is not published anywhere. Buyers and sellers negotiate against anecdote, and the only benchmarks available are American, drawn from a different tax system, a different lending market and a different set of buyers. The index is an attempt to replace that with a measured record.
It works by observing public listings every day and recording what changed. A listing that disappears is the most valuable observation in the dataset — it has sold or been withdrawn — and it is also the easiest thing to record wrongly, because a firewall block and a withdrawn listing look identical if you only check whether a page loaded. Everything about how this is handled is set out in the methodology.
What the index can report today
The value of a longitudinal series is a function of how long it has run, and that is the one thing that cannot be accelerated. Continuous observation began on September 1, 2026, across 10 sources.
| Measure | Availability |
|---|---|
| Asking-price distributions, by sector and geography | Available now |
| Listing counts and market composition | Available now |
| Price-change frequency | About one month of observation |
| Departure rate — sold or withdrawn, undifferentiated | About two quarters |
| Days on market (median and distribution) | About two quarters |
| Asking-to-sale spread | Only once sale outcomes are observable at source |
Publishing a duration or an outcome rate before the series can support it would be the fastest way to lose the right to be cited, so those figures wait. Where a figure does ship, it carries its sample size, and any cut too small to be honest is suppressed and marked as suppressed.
What the listings actually state
Coverage is uneven and stating it plainly is part of the method. Sellers advertise a price far more often than they advertise earnings, which is why this index leads with asking prices and treats earnings multiples as a longer-term goal.
| Field | Listings stating it | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Asking price | 11,084 of 11,492 | 96% |
| Sector | 11,492 of 11,492 | 100% |
| Province | 11,492 of 11,492 | 100% |
| City | 9,387 of 11,492 | 82% |
| Revenue | 2,030 of 11,492 | 18% |
| Cash flow / SDE | 1,551 of 11,492 | 13% |
| EBITDA | 36 of 11,492 | 0% |
The clock, and why two kinds of listing are not the same
Days on market needs a start date. For 10,855 listings that were already in the corpus when observation began, we know when we first captured them but never when the source first published them — the true duration is longer than anything we can see. For 2,877 listings we watched appear, the clock is exact.
The two are recorded separately and are never averaged together. Mixing them would bias every duration downward and produce a median that is simply wrong.
What is it worth, and should you buy it
This index answers the first question. For the second — how to value a business, how to run diligence, how deals fall apart — Treadstone Associates publishes the advisory side of the same work.