What Southern California preschools ask
Dashboard first. This front page ties together acquisition benchmarks, diligence status, market/provider coverage, TAM proxy status, key findings, 30-day plan progress, and AI/search readiness. It is broader than a comps sheet, but it is still source-backed and mostly a for-sale listing and acquisition-market summary. These are asking prices, not sale prices — actual transaction values in small-business M&A are private and almost never disclosed.
Asking price scales with licensed capacity, not with claimed earnings
Listings rarely disclose revenue or EBITDA, so a multiple-of-earnings benchmark cannot be built from this data. Asking price per licensed slot can. Use it to set an opening acquisition offer range, then let the diligence rubric move it.
Four findings that stop a deal outright
- Open CDSS Type A citation or pending administrative action
- Lease term shorter than the loan term with no extension option
- Director departing with no qualified replacement identified
- Business currently closed — no active license to inherit
What this data can't tell you
- Sale prices — only asking prices are published
- Revenue, EBITDA, or SDE — almost never listed
- Actual enrollment — disclosed on roughly a third of listings
- Tuition rates — never in listings. That's what the Market DB competitor section is for.
Acquisition asking price per licensed slot
Filter and sort the asking-price set. Asking price per licensed slot equals asking price divided by licensed capacity; it is not tuition or a sale-price benchmark.
Last sales scan
Checks only the two authorized broker listings pages for newly visible candidates. Existing comps never change automatically; every candidate remains separate until reviewed.
Static preview: no sales scan has been attempted.
| Listing | Status | Region | Real estate included | ZIP code | Address | Asking price | Licensed capacity | Asking price / licensed slot | Enrolled | Features | Source |
|---|
Add a listing
Paste the listing text and the fields fill themselves. Correct anything wrong, then add.
Paste source text or enter fields manually. The source URL is recorded for review; missing address, ZIP, real-estate terms, and pricing details remain unknown.
Base set captured July 2026 from California Preschool Brokers. No per-listing permalinks exist on that page, so source links point to the page. Statuses reflect the July capture. These are seed research records, not current broker-confirmed inventory.
Competitor tuition — LA & San Gabriel Valley
Parent tuition is separate from acquisition asking prices. These records show the demand-side economics that shape a premium 1:6 program; they are not a complete market census or a substitute for current calls and tours.
| School | City | Full-day tuition / month | Half-day tuition / month | Ratio | Ages | Waitlist | Evidence | Link |
|---|
Log a school
Fill this in after each call or tour. Evidence matters as much as the number — a rate you confirmed by phone is worth more than an aggregator average.
Record the source and date with every tuition observation. Capture what parents praise or complain about alongside price, ratio, and age band; do not treat an aggregate or website entry as a confirmed quote.
Diligence + financing model
One deal workspace: answer the diligence rubric from documents, then stress the same deal through the deterministic financing model below. The math is not AI-generated.
Model the financing
Carries the price and EBITDA below into the capital stack. This math stays deterministic, not AI-generated.
Deal inputs
Kill switches
Tick anything confirmed true. Any single one stops the deal regardless of every other answer.
Save or reload this deal
Export the current deal as an Excel-readable financial model with formulas, or upload a model for review. Shared storage/import is not yet available here; file export is the reliable fallback.
Financing model
Populated from the Diligence tab. Lenders underwrite EBITDA after a market-rate manager — with no ECE background on your side, that director salary is a real cost, not an addback.
Deal & structure
Bank / SBA loan
Operating assumptions
Notes + Findings
Raw notes and distilled findings live together here. Notes are what you heard; findings are the durable conclusions that should change underwriting, diligence, or negotiation.
Before you paste anything
Keep two things out of any notes database that an AI service can read: children's names or roster data, and seller financials under NDA. Summarize rosters as counts and age bands. Keep NDA'd P&Ls in your own files and record only the conclusions here.
Add a note
Paste the raw note first. AI can draft the title, type, subject, tags, and sensitivity; review before saving.
Normal = searchable and may be used in AI answers. No AI = searchable locally if appropriate but excluded from hosted AI requests. Private = excluded from hosted AI requests and treated as sensitive.
Findings
Durable lessons that should survive any single deal. Red left border means it reversed or complicated earlier advice — those are the most valuable and the easiest to lose.
Add a finding
Findings belong in the shared workspace, not only in one person's browser. Keep the file export as a backup copy.
Ask across your notes
When the shared intelligence service is available, this searches notes, findings, source records, and submitted working state before answering in context. Ask questions such as “What did directors say about infant margins?” or “Which brokers mentioned TK pressure?”
Where records should live
Records saved through the shared service are available to the deal team. In static or offline mode, browser-local changes remain a working copy until exported.
Use exports as backups. Do not treat browser-local records as shared diligence evidence.
Market DB — providers + competition
One market workspace for childcare supply, parent tuition, waitlists, source evidence, and competitor positioning. Sales stays separate because acquisition asking prices are a different dataset.
| Provider | City | ZIP Code | Type | Ages | Features | Parent tuition | Period | Evidence | Source |
|---|
Import Upwards by zip or city
Uses the approved service to review allowed Upwards canonical pages. ZIP imports use Upwards' clean ?search= redirect, not blocked latitude/longitude map URLs. Extracted provider fields remain drafts and must be checked against source-visible data.
Add a provider
Use this for Upwards, school websites, phone quotes, tours, and pasted provider pages. Keep roster details out.
TAM / Heat Map
Read-only comparison of the current LA-area market definitions. Scores are deterministic proxy math from stored observations; they are not live census imports, enrollment forecasts, revenue estimates, or acquisition recommendations.
Fixture/proxy data warning
This tab uses local ACS-style, NCES-style, and CDSS-style fixture data until documented official snapshots are imported. Missing values are shown as missing or not scored; they are not treated as zero.
| Ranked market | Deterministic proxy score | Confidence | Rough under-5 demand base | Licensed providers | Licensed slots | Source vintage | Warnings |
|---|
30 days, three motions a week
This fixes the actual constraint. You can't yet tell a good preschool from a bad one by walking into it, and no software solves that.
Add a task
Media
Track current policy and demand signals, then pin sources worth revisiting. Refresh pulls allowed RSS feeds through the shared service when available; it does not update acquisition comps.
Add a link
Approved feeds
Verified endpoints, ordered by how much signal they carry for this thesis:
edsource.org/feed/atom · deepest CA early-ed policy reportingCalMatters education —
calmatters.org/category/education/feed/ · the TK closure researchLAist —
laist.com/rss-feed · LA County education and local policyL.A. Parent —
laparent.com/feed · demand-side signal; what parents are shopping forCDSS licensing updates have no RSS — check the CCLD provider page manually.
If the feed service fails, curated items remain visible and the feed does not update. Review publication date and source relevance before using an item in diligence.