GRAPH Papers® Commercial Diligence Best Practices

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James Tetherton

James is a Co-founder and Senior Partner at GRAPH. He has 20 years’ experience in strategy consulting, having served clients throughout Europe, North America and Asia. READ MORE

Author: James Tetherton
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041

Winning in the Swing States – Commercial Due Diligence Lessons from Political Strategy

By James Tetherton

2024 will see national elections in both the US and the UK.* In both cases, the election will be won and lost in a handful of key marginal seats (or “swing states,” for US readers) - constituencies where the winning margin at the last election was less than 5% of the vote.
036

Maximising the Effectiveness of Early-Stage Commercial Diligence

By James Tetherton

We’re seeing a pronounced shift - from clients across the Private Equity landscape – towards conducting more, and earlier, “pre-deal” commercial work.
031

Assessing the Impact of Cyclicality in an Investment – a Voice-of-Customer Informed Diligence Approach

By James Tetherton

How a company will perform in weaker economic conditions is top of mind for investors when considering a potential acquisition. The starting point for that analysis is usually an examination of how the business fared during the last downturn. Studying prior financial performance – in terms of revenue, pricing and margins – is a critical first step. How steep was the decline? How fast was the…
026

Maximizing the Potential of Industrial Tech

By James Tetherton

Judging by my recent conversations with clients, industrial tech continues to be an area of significant interest for private equity investors.
023

Commercial Due Diligence Tips When Forecasting Technology Adoption

By James Tetherton

Many recent PE deals have targeted businesses that apply technology to help customers streamline processes which have previously been manual and “paper-based.”
017

Three Key Steps for Crafting a Robust Value Generation Plan

By James Tetherton

Value creation ("Value Gen") isn’t easy right now. Average transaction multiples are at their highest level in 10 years. More and more prospective targets have already been through multiple rounds of PE ownership, with the “easy and obvious” value improvements already made. Fewer proprietary deals seem to exist.
014

A Commercial Due Diligence Perspective on Buyer Power

By James Tetherton

Everyone will be familiar with the concept of “Buyer Power” as described in Michael Porter’s famous framework. Indeed, almost all commercial due diligence exercises include some examination of TargetCo’s customers’ purchasing power – more specifically, the customers’ ability to apply pressure to lower prices or drive improvements in product (and service) quality, features and…
012

Logo Inflation

By James Tetherton

In virtually every CIM and VDD doc that I read recently (for B2B business, at least), an early page highlights a set of corporate logos of the target company’s key customers. Logos for large, well-known businesses are great; logos for significant and “cool” customers – those that are recognized as movers and shakers – are expressed boldly to help create “lift.”
010

Available Market Size

By James Tetherton

Why Large Markets Can Sometimes Feel Very Small (and why Addressable Market is insufficient) We’ve written before about the need to clearly define markets to inform accurate sizing. But even with the clearest possible definition, one other piece of analysis is critical, and is often overlooked – quantifying what we like to call the Available Market Size.
008

Complementary Combinations

By James Tetherton

Many Private Equity deals involve a “platform and add-on” play – predicated at least in part on “bigger is better”. Among the various benefits of consolidation, some of the most commonly cited value gen opportunities relate to bundling and cross-selling. Just this year, we’ve worked on deals from building products to processed meats where this has been a key part of the investment…

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