Due diligence consulting is a core part of our offering here at Unequal Outcome. We leverage the skills we use for our growth advisory work to supplement deal teams and support executives in assessing acquisitions.
Our due diligence consulting services
We perform a number of services integral to the commercial due diligence process for our clients. They are as follows:
- Market Research
- Voice of Customer interviews
- Consumer surveys
- Price benchmarking
- Competitive intelligence
As diligence consultants we work alongside your existing deal team, accountants and lawyers to elucidate the commercial, customer and competitor landscape the target company is operating in.
What are due diligence consultants?
Due diligence consultants provide a range of due diligence consulting services to clients looking to make acquisitions or investments or perform a merger. At Unequal Outcome we specialize in commercial due diligence. We help clients form their diligence strategy and identify specific types of information related to commercial performance from their diligence checklist. Our work often forms a core part of the final diligence report, and clients rely on us to help make an accurate assessment of potential acquisitions. This includes opportunities for growth, as well as any commercial risk around the deal.
Our services
Market Research
Market research is a core competence here at Unequal Outcome. We perform desktop research (also sometimes known as secondary research) not simply to collect information, but to synthesize it to evaluate an investment opportunity, identify potential synergies, and minimize risk for our buy-side clients.
The value of this work is all in the market analysis. Clients turn to us for our blend of big business consulting and hands on founder experience. We take a tier 1 consulting toolkit and apply intuitive judgement alongside technical market analysis to enable the accurate evaluation of a target company’s commercial operating environment.
Voice of Customer interviews
This is an area in which we have extensive experience. To date, we have sourced and conducted over 1,000 interviews for clients across consumer, tech and healthcare verticals. We offer both a ‘done for you’ and a ‘done with you’ service.
In both the B2B and B2C domains we use our hands on marketing implementation skills to source potential customers, existing customers from the target company’s customer base, and competitor customers via social media, email and where appropriate telephone. We screen these respondents to collect a broad initial set of responses for key questions. Then we either interview the most promising candidates on our clients behalf, providing detailed interview notes and recordings, or we provide clients with the opportunity to conduct ‘blinded’ interviews using our company as the intermediary. For our private equity clients this is often a valuable opportunity to speak directly with customers without flagging their interest in the deal.
Consumer surveys
Another related diligence service we offer clients is the creation and distribution of consumer surveys. We have successfully surveyed consumers for private equity and consumer companies across every major vertical. These have aided clients in understanding everything from the current state of their customer base, to audience sentiment around competitors, to the potential size and demand of adjacent markets.
These surveys have been used by sales, marketing and operations teams to better focus messaging, get insight into marketing opportunities and ultimately increase revenue. Deal teams at private equity firms have used them to assess market perception of a potential acquisition, confirm growth opportunities, and surface any red flags around a proposed transaction.
Price benchmarking
We perform price benchmarking across both consumer and B2B verticals for private equity firms, their portfolio companies and clients across the consumer, tech and healthcare verticals. Clients often come to us for this service when they are digging into a company’s business model as part of a business plan assessment, or as part of the post merger or acquisition operational lift.
We perform both desktop and interview based analysis of a target company’s market to understand how competitors price and sell themselves against the target company. Improving pricing strategy is an obvious lever many of our clients look to to unlock future growth, whether they are private equity firms or corporate acquirers. The opportunity to improve pricing is often a key part of the investment decision, and we provide the leg work to gather data and assess the current market position.
Beyond the simple numbers, we are often asked to make an assessment of how the company’s competitors sell themselves. Our expertise as growth consultants leaves us well placed to provide this type of insight to our clients. We will look at the target company and how it is positioned versus its competitors in the space. This might be the messaging, buyer personas targeted, assessment of the respective sales funnels, use of lead magnets, sales team composition, employee turnover and other factors that might indicate the relative strength of a target company within its market.
Competitive intelligence
Our competitive intelligence offering is another service that often combines desktop and primary research such as interviews and surveys. Clients come to us when they have an operations issue in the business or portfolio company and want to understand if that problem is something that’s replicated across their competitors, or whether it is something unique that’s restricting their growth. This might be an issue like high churn in specific roles, hiring bottlenecks, or sluggish sales.
Conclusion
Our due diligence services are aimed at supporting deal teams and senior management in corporate acquisitions to make an informed assessment of a potential deal. This is a broad ranging exercise that looks to identify risk, assess growth potential, evaluate a company’s operations and bring focus to the commercial landscape surrounding a potential acquisition.
As due diligence consultants we have worked with many of the leading investors globally, across tens of billions in deal value. If you’d like to know more, please contact us to request our service deck or get support with your deal.