Diligence Matters Best Practices Briefs

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Value Generation

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Topic: Value Generation
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042

The Next Step Beyond NPS (Net Promoter Score)

By Eoghan Bees

A common metric leveraged in commercial diligence – NPS (Net Promoter Score) – is based on a single and simple question presented to users of a good or service: “On a score of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend [XYZ] to a friend or colleague?” The metric and the question are designed to measure current satisfaction, and the design logic of the question (and the associated…
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…
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…
023

The Battlefront for the Keystone Position in an Ecosystem

By Jeff Merkle

Direct competition between ecosystems – iOS vs. Android; Twitter (or "the X"*) vs. Instagram (Meta) – is often studied and constantly the subject of various tech press and opinion pieces. There are many good reasons for this that all analogize to the same reason journalists love to cover competitive tournaments:
022

Value Gen Stimulant in Commercial Diligence Processes

By Mark Stein

Today’s GRAPH Papers® article is short and simple. A quick process, best-practice on the value gen. front of commercial diligence that could prove to be a useful commitment to make for your projects. Most diligence assignments start with discussion, and some amount of the diligence agenda, focused on testing the commercial value generation ideas that exist. And among investment teams, we know…
018

Observations on How Financial (PE) and Strategic (Corp Dev) Investors Consider Segmentation Opportunities Differently from One Another

By Mark Stein

Serving a wide-range of clients, one pattern that I have noticed is the degree to which the strongest Corp Dev groups (the “Strategics”) consider customer segments as a means for asset value creation – and do so in ways that outrun what many Private Equity firms consider.
015

Value Gen: Transitioning the Core Business

By Jeff Merkle

In search of higher multiples, investors and their advisors are increasingly pressuring companies to transition their core business to match “themes” that earn higher valuations. For instance, businesses that would rightly be described as professional services with just a hint of a technology base – such as a staffing service with a proprietary database – become “technology enabled…
013

Using Diligence and the Ownership Change to Leverage What Matters to Customers

By Mark Stein

Conducting commercial diligence that matters should equip the new owner and the leadership team with insights that can quickly make an impact on market share and pricing opportunities (among other opportunities).

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