This is the work of getting a company genuinely ready for a sale, so the value stands up when a buyer’s advisers start pulling on it. You do this in the year or so before a process, while there’s still time to fix what diligence would otherwise find and discount.
When to hire an external consultant
A sale is on the horizon and you’d rather find the problems yourself than have a buyer find them and reprice.
Your numbers and your equity story aren’t yet in the shape a serious process demands.
You need someone who’s sat on the buy-side and knows exactly where they’ll dig.
Typical activities
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Running the exit readiness review: a vendor-side look at where value could leak in diligence.
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Cleaning up the quality of earnings, the working-capital story and anything that won’t survive scrutiny.
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Building the equity story and the numbers behind it, so the plan is credible rather than hopeful.
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Getting the data room, the reporting and the KPIs into a state that speeds a process up instead of stalling it.
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Fixing the fixable issues while there’s still time, and flagging the ones to get ahead of.
Our Members specialised in this service come from Big Four deals, corporate finance and M&A boutiques, investment banking and PE. We look for people who’ve prepared companies for sale and been on the buy-side of enough deals to know exactly where the discount comes from.
“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.”
“Through Sweav we quickly found exactly the right person for the job. The Sweaver provided great comfort to us as investors and to the portfolio company CFO by taking full ownership by managing the internal sell-side process.”
