Buying a business
From the outset, our Transaction Services team invests the time to understand your growth objectives, the strategic rationale for the acquisition and your investment criteria. We tailor our due diligence approach to your needs, designing key deal hypotheses to help validate critical financial and commercial assumptions and identify potential risks and opportunities that affect deal value.
During the early process of screening opportunities, we can:
- Help you evaluate the opportunity by reference to the deal structure, asset quality and associated risks
- Undertake high level, preliminary analysis to independently assess the opportunity against your strategic objectives and investment criteria
- Give you initial comfort as to whether the numbers are realistic and justify the proposed deal
- Assist you in developing a robust due diligence approach to optimise the chances of a successful acquisition.
At this point in the buy-side process, business leaders risk having their objectivity clouded: the stress and excitement of getting the deal done can lead to paying too much for the target business or pushing too hard on the possible synergies to make the deal work. Decisions that are taken outside the established investment undermine the chances of a successful, sustainable acquisition that delivers on its strategic objectives. To mitigate the risk over paying for an investment, we undertake rigorous due diligence on:
- Underlying earnings sustainability
- Current and forecast earnings
- Key revenue and cost drivers
- Revenue and technology risks
- Potential untapped increases in value
- Potential synergies and hidden risks to assist you in pro-actively managing those risks and optimising post-acquisition synergies
Our due diligence findings also feed into deal structuring considerations and bring to light other issues that may influence deal negotiations. We are experienced in advising our clients on optimising deal value – or preventing value leakage – through proper management of the accounting and financial aspects of the sale and purchase agreement and completion balance sheet review.