I'm very sorry for your circumstances, but are the "every buyer ghosted me when they saw our financials" and "our accountant had dementia" elements of this related? How could millions of dollars of net income go to insolvent so quickly?
There are two sides to this general issue, and while there are bad buyers there are people dishonestly presenting their companies. Not that you are, but it seems like a very low-trust business environment in both directions. More lately than it used to be.
There's obviously a lot more nuance to the situation. I'm here just posting my in-passing rambling, glossing over most details. In general, any mistakes made were clearly presented, and no numbers were deceivingly absent or misrepresented.
The accountant issue is related because there were a number of major issues that lead to the downfall. One being the entire year-long+ selling debacle, the other other was accounting issues.
FWIW, both brokers (2 deals on 1, 1 on another) both said "we've never seen anything like this in the entire time of doing this." I think a lot of it was just bad luck, or low quality buyers and not having experience to see certain red flags.
As far as insolvency so quickly, we were a 2 man company with 0 employees. I started the company several years ago with zero business experience and we grew it to 11 million per year. So there were many mistakes along the way (all of which were clearly laid out to potential buyers btw). We re-invested almost all our money to grow bigger and quickly.
There are two sides to this general issue, and while there are bad buyers there are people dishonestly presenting their companies. Not that you are, but it seems like a very low-trust business environment in both directions. More lately than it used to be.