A deal · ~15 min · free
Where does this deal honestly stand?
The calculators for a sale or a purchase are on the deal calculators page.
What businesses sell for
Every deal has a case. The people who want the deal to happen write most cases.
These three checks ask the questions a sceptical investment committee, board or buyer would ask. Then they score how well the evidence answers them. Fifteen minutes. Take it before the meeting.
Four seats. Pick the one you are in.
Each card says who it is for, and who it is not for. Where a check is not yet live, the card says so and takes your interest.
Buying a business
Is this the right check?
Not for you if you are buying to keep and combine with your own business: take the corporate buyer check.Five dimensions: business definition, the market, competitive advantage, value creation, deal killers. About twenty questions.Is this the right check?
Not for you if you will sell again in a few years and nothing gets combined: take the PE fund check.Five dimensions: business definition, the market, competitive advantage, synergies, deal killers. About twenty questions. One question first: do you already operate in the target's core market?Is this the right check?
Not for you if you will sell again in a few years: take the PE fund check.Is this the right check?
Not for founders: if you are the one raising, take the early-stage investor readiness check.Selling a business
Is this the right check?
Not for you if a sale is some way off and you want to raise money: take the capital raising readiness check.Five dimensions: buyers and story, key business tests, value creation, key risks and dependencies, readiness. About twenty-five questions.Raising capital
Is this the right check?
Not for you if the business does not yet make a profit: take the early-stage check. Nor if a sale process is already under way: take the seller check.Five dimensions: the story and the plan, numbers that survive diligence, the business under the numbers, ownership, structure and governance, running the raise. About twenty-five questions.Is this the right check?
Not for you if investors would value you on your earnings, or you are raising debt: take the capital raising readiness check. Nor if you are the investor: the venture fund check is coming.Six dimensions, about twenty-five questions. The detail is on its way.After the deal
Is this the right check?
Not for you if you are still deciding whether to buy: take the corporate buyer check first.Six dimensions: end state and integration intent, governance and the integration office, day-one readiness and control, people, leadership and culture, momentum with customers and revenue, tracking, risk and communication. About twenty practices.Each move in the seller check's report has a guide, with what to do and a worked example. Read the seller move guides.
Sample report · deal checks
What a deal check gives back
Illustrative businesses, answered through the real checks.
The PE fund check · illustrative
A fund weighing a buyout of a regional distributor of industrial spare parts.
Slow down: finish the homework
A to-do list, not a warning.
What this means
Two of the nine warning questions sit at Doubtful or below: “Does the plan follow from the record?” and “Has the downside been run on the debt and fixed charges the target will carry after the deal?”. None of them is about whether the business can be taken away from you. They are your own homework: the record, the plan, the people and the structure. A list like this is normal at this stage. Close each item before the price is set. What would move each one is below.
The workplan: your three weakest answers
- Does the plan follow from the record?
What would move it
You placed it at Doubtful: the plan outruns the run-rate, and the only explanation offered is the levers. The next stage, Unproven, is the plan is bridged to history at the top line only; the drivers underneath have not been reconciled.Bridge the plan to the last three years driver by driver, volume, price, mix, openings, share, test the base year for one-offs, name what changed for every step above the run-rate, and re-base the case to the drivers you believe before pricing. - Has the downside been run on the debt and fixed charges the target will carry after the deal?
What would move it
You placed it at Doubtful: earnings have fallen or swung in the last ten years, and the debt and rent are sized to the plan with no bad year run against them. The next stage, Unproven, is earnings have been steady, the fixed charges are totalled against the base case, and no bad year has been run.List every fixed claim the target will carry after the deal, interest and repayments, rent including rent after a sale and leaseback, take-or-pay and any dividend the structure must fund, and run the total against the worst year in the record. If the target could not have paid it then, resize the structure or reprice. - Can we double EBITDA in five years?
What would move it
You placed it at Doubtful: the doubling relies on the market doing all the work, or on revenue growth that never reaches EBITDA. The next stage, Unproven, is a path to double EBITDA exists on paper; the levers are unsized.Build the path from today's EBITDA to double in five years, bar by bar, from market, share and margin evidence, and mark which bars the base case already needs.
This check reads your case, not the deal. It does not tell you whether to buy or what to pay.
The seller check · illustrative
The owner of a family-run specialist food manufacturer, two years from a sale.
Slow down
What this means
One of the six questions this check weighs most sits at Doubtful or below. Each is listed with what would move it.
The workplan: your three weakest answers
- Could we open a data room next month?
What would move it
You placed it at Red flag: a data request would take a month and a prayer, and we couldn't name a large customer we'd let a buyer call. The next stage, Doubtful, is the documents exist somewhere and assembly is unstarted; a list of friendly customers for buyer calls hasn't been thought about.Run vendor due diligence, close the gaps it finds, assemble a data room that could open next month, and brief a list of large, friendly customers to take a buyer's call. - Does the business run without the owner?
What would move it
You placed it at Doubtful: a second layer exists on the chart; in practice decisions wait, and the largest customers deal only with the owner. The next stage, Unproven, is some decision rights are delegated and some customers are handled by others, but nobody has tested a month without the owner.Delegate decision rights and the top customer relationships to named people, run a full quarter with the owner out of day-to-day decisions, and put the numbers from that quarter in the story. A buyer pays for a business, not a person. - Do we hit our forecasts, and can we produce the numbers a buyer asks for?
What would move it
You placed it at Doubtful: nobody compares the forecast with what happened; annual statements are all there is. The next stage, Unproven, is we roughly land the numbers; monthly reporting is consistent, but for under two years.Keep a documented budget-versus-actual record, explain every miss, and build the segment and customer cuts a buyer will ask for so they come on request.
This is a reading of how much of the case is evidence. It is not a verdict on the deal.
How the deal checks work, what they cover, and your questions
Mixed situation, or more than one seat? Take the check for the seat you hold on this deal today. You are invited to the other afterwards.
The buying and selling checks score the deal, not you.
Each question offers five answers: red flag, doubtful, unproven, supported and proven. The top answer needs two things, a yes and the evidence for it.
A true answer nobody has proven scores as unproven. That is the point. Most deal cases are full of true things nobody has checked.
The raising and after-the-deal checks are different. They score your own readiness on the five Stages of Excellence, the way the business checks do. No deal exists yet to score.
What the checks cover
Buying as a fund.
- Business definition: what is this business, really, and how does it make money?
- The market: are its segments growing, and is that proven?
- Competitive advantage: does it have a growth engine, loyal customers and an edge that lasts?
- Value creation: can we double EBITDA in five years, and does the plan follow from the record?
- Deal killers: what could take this to zero, and are the key risks dealt with?
Buying as a strategic acquirer. The same first three dimensions, asked of the target and of your knowledge of its market. Then:
- Synergies: do we have them, how big are they net of what we lose, and how easily are they unlocked?
- Deal killers: what kills the deal or the value after it, including integration?
Selling.
- Buyers and story: who would buy this business, why, and can we prove it?
- Key business tests: would we pass the buyer's interrogation of the business itself?
- Value creation: what EBITDA growth are we selling, and have we started delivering it?
- Key risks and dependencies: what will the buyer's risk scan find, and are we ready for it?
- Readiness: could we run a process next quarter?
Sentences from the check:
The plan outruns the run-rate, and the only explanation offered is the levers. Each lever is assigned to a role that does not exist yet. The logic is "it came up for sale": the strategy must be rewritten to fit the deal, and we could build the same thing cheaper. There is no initiative list; "growth" is a number on the last slide. Nothing has started; every initiative begins after the sale.
Each of these sits at the weak end of the five answers on its question, which run from a red flag to proven. If one of them is true of your deal, the check says so. Then it shows you the next answer up: what it would take to prove the opposite.
What you get
[sample report]
Your profile across the five dimensions, in the scale's own words. A verdict on whether the case is ready to be decided on.
The fund check gives one of four lines: "Keep going", "Slow down: finish the homework", "Slow down: real doubts" or "Stop". The buyer and seller checks give three: keep going, slow down, or stop. It never says "do the deal". It says how much of the case is evidence.
Then the two or three questions where better evidence would move the answer most, each with what proving it would take. A one-page version written to be put in front of the committee, the board or your adviser.
Fair questions
How long does it take? About fifteen minutes. One dimension per screen, and you can stop and come back.
Who sees my answers? You. The check never asks for the name of the target or the counterparty. Individual answers stay private. Anonymised aggregates are used for benchmarking. A comparison appears only once enough comparable deals have been scored.
Does it work? We tested the fund check on 105 public buyouts, in an exploratory, AI-assisted retrospective test. It raised a warning on 43 of the 51 that later failed, and on 14 of the 54 that succeeded. The limits are on the method page: some answers rest on what the AI agents already knew, and the warning was tuned on these deals.
Is this due diligence? No. It tells you which questions your diligence has not yet answered. It does not answer them.
Is this advice? No. It lets you assess for yourself how well a deal case stands up. The questions are built from more than 30 years of strategy consulting and over 1,000 engagements. What you do with it is yours.
What happens after? Your report opens on screen when you finish. An email is optional: give one only if you want a copy sent to you. Nobody calls. If you want to talk, there is a button on your report. Nobody will contact you otherwise.
Start the check
Pick the seat you are in above. In our experience the useful moment comes before the case is written, while the answer can still change the price.
~15 min · free