Thanks for the reply, I agree with you. Parenthetically, I know you can negotiate anything you want. I went to law school (though never practiced) and I find one of the common misconceptions is that contracts are these highly fomulaic documents with no room for creativity. The reality is, as you say, that you can put whatever you want in there. Contract law is mostly about enforcing the freely-negotiated agreements between parties. I wrote a lot of contracts that were highly specific to the scenarios in question and there was a ton of creativity - only trick was to use very precise language (verbose bordering on annoying).

My question was more whether this is something that is done in such contexts, namely smallish acquisitions. I think you're right that Baremetrics made a mistake here in not insisting on some of the things you mentioned.