Can I do due diligence myself, or do I need advisors?

First-time buyers often ask this because professional fees feel like an avoidable cost on top of the purchase price itself. The honest answer is that some diligence work is well within a careful buyer’s own ability, and some genuinely is not — not because it is complicated in the abstract, but because parts of it require professional judgment or a licence to perform properly.

What a buyer can reasonably do alone

• Reading every document provided closely, and making a specific list of what does not add up
• Visiting the business at different times to see it operating without the seller present
• Checking online reviews, social presence and public records for consistency with what you have been told
• Talking directly to the seller about the business’s history, challenges and reasons for selling
• Building a simple financial model to sanity-check the numbers before advisors get formally involved

Where a professional is genuinely needed

Reviewing financial statements and tax filings properly — reconciling them, spotting normalization that does not hold up, assessing whether reported earnings are sustainable — is accounting work, and it benefits from someone who reviews businesses for a living rather than one. Legal review of the purchase agreement, corporate status, contracts, leases and any registered claims against the assets requires a lawyer, both for the expertise and because parts of that work are restricted to licensed professionals.

A reasonable way to split the work

Do the reading, the visiting and the questioning yourself early, before formally engaging advisors — it makes you a better client, and it often surfaces the specific questions worth paying a professional to chase down. Bring in an accountant and lawyer once you are seriously considering an offer, and use their time on what actually needs their judgment rather than paying them to read documents you could reasonably read yourself first.

The risk of skipping the professional side entirely

The most common outcome for a buyer who tries to do all of it alone is not fraud going undetected — it is missing something ordinary that a professional would have caught as a matter of routine, like an unassignable contract or an outstanding CRA balance. That is a real cost, even though it never shows up as an invoice.