Commercial Due Diligence: Industrials Buyout

Management's plan leaned on customer retention and a pricing story the deal team could not yet independently verify. Inside exclusivity, with a hard clock, the fund needed direct evidence from the people on the other side of the target's invoices: its customers, its rivals and its channel. That evidence would confirm or challenge the base case underwriting the deal.

• +Aligned the call plan to the specific lines in the model most sensitive to being wrong: retention, pricing and share
• +Sourced fourteen experts across the target's customers, two direct competitors and its distribution channel
• +Ran the calls in parallel with the consultants' CDD so findings landed while the model was still moving
• +Kept every call to public-domain and general-market knowledge, screened before delivery

• +Fourteen anonymised call notes plus a synthesis mapped to the model's key sensitivities
• +An independent read on customer retention risk and the durability of the pricing story
• +A channel-level view of how the target really competes, versus how management described it

• +The fund used the findings to renegotiate. The retention picture was softer than the CIM implied
• +Two customer-concentration risks surfaced in the calls were written into the SPA protections
• +The primary-research layer became a standing part of the fund's CDD on every platform deal

This is a representative, anonymised composite of a typical private equity engagement. Client identity is removed and the figures illustrate the format and scale of the work. They are not a record of a single named mandate. Every expert call is scoped to general market knowledge, screened for material non-public information before findings reach a deal team, and documented for audit. See our compliance framework for full detail.