What we do
Financial diligence tells you what the business earned. Commercial diligence tells you whether the market is there. Neither tells you whether the people running it can deliver the thesis you are about to underwrite.
Every engagement starts from the same question: which assessment design does this role actually call for? The four designs, and how we choose →
Three windows
Each is a different engagement with a different question, a different level of access, and a different audience for the answer.
Management presentations are a performance, and sophisticated buyers discount them accordingly. We assess your team the way a buyer’s advisor would, several months earlier, while there is still time to act on it. Key-person risk disclosed on your terms is worth considerably more than key-person risk discovered in week six of diligence. Gaps you close before the process do not become price adjustments during it.
The question is not whether this team has run the business well to date. It is whether they can run the business described in your model — which, in most cases, nobody has yet asked them to do. We build the scorecard from the thesis and the operating model at close, then assess the incumbent team against that, inside the diligence window and under whatever access constraints the process allows.
The plan assumed roles. What arrives is people, duplicates of several functions, and two cultures with different ideas about how decisions get made. We assess both sides against one standard so that who stays is decided on evidence rather than on who the acquirer happened to know — and we identify the people worth retaining before someone else approaches them.
How this is different
The management team has run the business as it is. Your thesis describes a business that does not yet exist — different scale, different pace, different reporting cadence, sometimes a different market. A CFO who is excellent at the current size can be the wrong CFO for the one in the model, and nothing in their record will say so. The scorecard has to be built from the model.
An unannounced process rules out most reference checking. A management team that knows it is being evaluated by a prospective owner behaves accordingly. We work within those limits and then state them plainly, because a confident verdict built on partial access is worse than an honest one with its boundaries drawn.
Fixed, quoted and agreed before work begins. We do not take a contingent element and the engagement carries no placement obligation. Search firms conducting management assessment have an interest in finding someone wanting; if a search follows our work, that is a separate decision you make afterwards, not a reason we had going in.
A team map nobody can show anyone is an expensive document. You receive a version written for the deal team and, where the engagement calls for it, a version that can be given to the individuals themselves. The people assessed usually still work there on Monday.
What you receive
Who engages us for this: Private equity sponsors and their operating partners · Independent sponsors and search funds · Family offices acquiring directly · Strategic acquirers without an internal human capital function · Owners preparing a business for sale
Investment
| Item | Standard |
|---|---|
| Up to 5 executives | $28,000 |
| 6 to 10 executives | $45,000 |
| 11 or more | Quoted |
Three weeks from the point we have access to the people. Where a process delays or limits that access, we say so and re-date rather than compress the work. The fee is fixed before work begins, unchanged by findings, with no placement obligation.
We assess people. We do not assess financials, systems, contracts or legal exposure, and this work does not substitute for the diligence that does. Nor is a management assessment a prediction: structured selection evidence improves on unstructured judgment substantially, and on chance considerably, but it does not tell you what a person will do in conditions nobody has seen yet. Where we are confident, we will say so. Where we are not, we will say that too, and tell you what would be required to close the gap.
Industries
The method does not change between sectors. What we look for, and who we call to check it, does — and that is the part that requires knowing the industry.
Start a conversation
Twenty minutes. I will tell you honestly whether this is work I should be doing and what I would do differently. If it is not a fit, I will say so and point you somewhere better.
jj@celersilens.com 704-740-2099
