Diligence Matters Best Practices Briefs

Taking Price Seriously in Commercial Due Diligence (CDD) Mandates

By Jeff Merkle

Using pricing as a lever is massively powerful, yet pricing is an often overlooked and underappreciated part of diligence. Several years back, one of the large corporate finance consultancies did some modeling using income statements from the top 1000 firms – they found that a 1% increase in average price with an “inelastic” customer base (i.e., no resulting change in demand) resulted in a…