About the reports.
Independent county reports on Kentucky local economies. Outside any chamber, EDO, or government office. Free to read.
What's in a report.
Each report reads one Kentucky county and proposes three to six specific business candidates worth investigating this week — with the math, named contacts, and what was ruled out and why.
The reports answer a question with no good public answer: in any given Kentucky county, what would actually work as a business someone could build for $100K+ in owner take-home?
How to run this lens on your own town.
If your county isn't published yet — and even if it is — this is the same lens we use, in four questions you can run yourself.
The county reports look like polished outputs but the underlying method is portable. We've used it on counties of very different shapes — a manufacturing-corridor regional hub, a healthcare-led tourism economy — and the same four questions surface the same kinds of opportunities. Here are the questions, in the order to run them.
- 01
What's leaking out of state?
Look for an out-of-area service company that publicly publishes a local anchor employer as a customer. A Tennessee operator's case-study page. An Ohio firm's targeted SEO landing page. A national contractor holding a federal contract for work in your county. The pattern is local-anchor demand routing somewhere else; the opportunity is the local replacement.
- 02
Who's been here 40+ years with a Yahoo email?
Founder-era trade and service operators with no public successor, no website beyond aggregator listings, and a contact that telegraphs another era. Long tenure plus minimal digital surface plus no named family successor is the succession-pending pattern in plain sight. These are the acquisition targets.
- 03
Who's the local consolidator?
Most counties have one — a regional holding company, a multi-vertical conglomerate, or a specialist roll-up that's quietly acquired several local trade businesses. They're worth knowing because a new entrant in the same vertical either competes with them, sells to them eventually, or carves a niche they decline. They are not adversaries. They are the other player.
- 04
What's the priced comparable you can wave at a banker?
A closed succession deal in the same vertical, in the same corridor, in the last three years — with named principals and a named lender. The deal you wave at a banker to say "this already happened here, with these people, at this price." Find that one and the financing conversation gets meaningfully shorter.
Run the four questions on your own county in any order. The answers won't always be there — sometimes the consolidator hasn't formed yet, sometimes there's no out-of-state spend leak. The pattern of which question goes blank is itself a finding. We won't have your county published until we do, but the lens isn't ours to keep.
What we won't do.
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Gate the reports.
No email walls, no payment, no "sign up to read." If a report exists, you can read it.
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Take cuts from people we point you to.
No referral fees or commissions from business brokers, lenders, franchises, or any operator we name in a report.
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Accept funding from anyone with a stake.
No money from chambers, EDOs, government offices, or any institution that has reason to bend how a county gets described.
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Publish a report we wouldn't act on.
If a candidate doesn't clear the floor, doesn't have the math, or doesn't have a named local who'll review it — it doesn't ship.
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Pretend to know what we don't.
Some economic layers are hard to read from public sources — energy extraction, defense procurement, large-scale ag. We say so on the page when that's true.
How this gets paid for.
KYData.biz is self-funded. The county reports are free to read and will stay that way.
The eventual plan is custom, scoped work for institutions that want a county or region read with our process applied — chambers, regional banks, business brokers, EDOs that aren't trying to shape the answer. When that work happens, it's disclosed by name on each county page it informed.
How we work.
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$100K+ owner take-home, within two years.
It's the floor. Below it, the candidate gets cut.
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Real dollars, not multiples.
We show the path: revenue, margin, debt service, what's left. Not "$1.5M at 2.5–4.0x SDE."
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Named names.
Specific operators, specific institutions, specific people to call — pulled from public sources we link.
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Local review where we can line one up.
Drafts go to a reviewer who lives in the county when one's available — someone who can flag what we got wrong before publishing.
What's next.
Warren County's full report is being written. After Warren: Pulaski, Daviess, Hardin, Fayette. Roughly one county per month at current capacity.
Contact.
[email protected] — the editorial inbox. Tell us what we got wrong, what county should be next, or what your town's economy actually is. Chambers, brokers, bankers, and EDOs considering custom work reach us at the same address.