Buy-Side Advisory
Discipline about what you buy, and at what price, is most of the return.
Criteria before opportunities
Acquirers who start from a written set of criteria buy better than those who react to whatever is on the market. The criteria decide what gets screened out quickly, which is where most of the time is saved.
We help set the criteria, build a pipeline against them, and then do the analytical work on the small number of targets that survive screening.
Scope of a buy-side engagement
- Acquisition strategy
- Target criteria definition
- Target identification and sourcing
- Initial screening
- Management meetings
- Financial and commercial analysis
- Indicative valuation
- Due-diligence workstream coordination
- Offer and structure modelling
- Negotiation support
- 100-day and value-creation planning
What we test on a target
Earnings
- Quality and durability of reported profit
- Normalisation adjustments
- Cash conversion
- Margin trend and pricing power
Dependency
- Customer concentration and contract terms
- Supplier and single-source risk
- Owner and key-person dependency
- Systems and process documentation
Deliverability
- Quality of records and data room
- Regulatory, licence and compliance position
- Litigation and contingent liabilities
- Realism of the seller's expectations
After completion
The plan for the first hundred days should be written before the deal signs — retention of key people, customer communication, systems and reporting, and the two or three value-creation actions that justified the price.
Start a confidential conversation
Whether you are preparing to sell, looking to acquire, raising capital or trying to lift the value of a business you already own, the first step is a short, confidential discussion about the situation.