Diligence Matters Best Practices Briefs

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Customer Behavior

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Topic: Customer Behavior
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041

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…
039

De-risking and Leveraging Brand Equity Ownership in Commercial Due Diligence

By Jeff Merkle

In Commercial Due Diligence, it’s often the assumption that customer relationships are an “asset” of the business, but that’s not always the case. The reality is that for many businesses, the quality and stability of customer relationships are owned by account representatives (and possibly only a few reps) – who walk out the door with those assets every night, and who (for the right…
030

Credit in the time of COVID

By Jeff Merkle

Any statement on the level of disruption that 2020 has served up risks being an understatement. In addition to reconsidering personal lives and routines, many investors have been forced to rethink world views on risk and downside – a subject we’ve been spending immense time on over these past 6 months. While GRAPH prides itself on thinking creatively about value gen opportunities for new…
026

Understanding the Market Share Equation in Diligence and in Value Gen. Exercises

By Jeff Merkle

I’ve been reflecting on Mark's recent article about how to better capitalize on brand equity – and particularly about those situations where you can exploit untapped brand equity. Mark promotes a winning investment formula of investing in cases where “RBE > RMS,” i.e., a company whose Relative Brand Equity is greater than its Relative Market Share. These situations are sadly not…

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