A CDD or market scan gives you an independent, evidence-based read on the commercial case or market potential before you commit. You do one when there’s real money on the line and the seller’s story, or your own growth plan, hasn’t been tested by anyone outside the room.
When to hire an external consultant
The deal has a deadline and your team already has a day job. Nobody’s running a full interview programme on the side of their week.
You need a read your IC, board or lender will treat as independent, and internal conviction doesn’t count as evidence.
It’s a market you don’t cover, so someone has to build the picture from scratch and do it in a few weeks.
Typical activities
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Sizing and segmenting the market, then checking whether the growth drivers actually hold.
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Mapping the competition and taking an honest look at where the target really wins, from market share to pricing power.
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Interviewing customers and industry experts about churn, switching behaviour, win/loss and what they’d pay.
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Working through the commercial data: cohorts, retention, pipeline quality, customer concentration, margin by segment.
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Writing it up as a go/no-go, or a shortlist of where to play and who’s worth buying, with the risks, the upside and the numbers your model needs.
Our Members specialised in this service come out of MBB or a commercial strategy firm, and a good number have also done time in M&A, investment banking or at a PE or VC fund. What we look for is people who’ve run CDDs and scans from start to finish with a deal clock ticking, and who write a conclusion instead of a 90-slide appendix.
“I like the pragmatic, fast and relatively cost effective way Sweav enables NewPort to get in flexible support on deals and value creation.”
“We quickly found an experienced and pragmatic professional through Sweav. He supported the portfolio company CFO and quickly took ownership of the internal sell-side processes. As a result, management had the bandwidth to stay focused on important business topics. Moreover, they could continue executing the growth agenda.”
