Isosceles News

Due Diligence Preparation Starts Long Before The Data Room

  In our experience, due diligence is the stage of a transaction where scrutiny intensifies. The data room opens, questions arrive, and the way information is produced and explained comes under closer examination. Due diligence rarely creates problems. It reveals how a business produces, explains, and stands behind information when it is under pressure. In practice, due diligence preparation means ensuring your business produces consistent, explainable information through normal operations, … Continue reading

Exit Planning 12 Months Out: A CFO’s Roadmap For A Clean Sale

  In the final year before a sale, the focus shifts. Buyers move beyond potential and begin testing the strength, consistency, and resilience of your narrative. Exit planning during this window is about deliberate preparation. A structured, CFO-led roadmap enables business owners to demonstrate control, reinforce credibility, and protect valuation under scrutiny. The final 12 months are an execution phase. What you prioritise, sequence, and strengthen during this time will … Continue reading

Business Sale Preparation: How To Reduce Due Diligence Risk And Protect Valuation

  Preparing your business for sale isn’t about building a long-term finance department. In most SME exits, finance teams are integrated or replaced after completion. What matters is whether buyers can move quickly and confidently: understanding performance, testing risk, and underwriting the value drivers they actually care about, growth, product strength, and market opportunity. This article focuses on targeted, CFO-led improvements that reduce friction during due diligence and protect valuation, … Continue reading

What Buyers Really Look For During Due Diligence (And Why Most SMEs Aren’t Ready)

  Due diligence preparation is the structured process of aligning reporting, governance, forecasting and documentation before external scrutiny begins. For owner-managed SMEs, it is not a last-minute data room exercise. It is a disciplined 12-18 month strengthening of financial and operational coherence. Most SME leaders understand what due diligence preparation involves in principle. Financial statements, contracts, forecasts, and a structured data room, etc. What often feels different is the level … Continue reading

Planning An Exit? 10 Signs Your Business Isn’t Ready

This exit readiness checklist is designed to test a simple question: If a buyer evaluated your business tomorrow, would it withstand sustained scrutiny across finance, operations and leadership? It’s easy to assume strong performance equals readiness. However, the market suggests otherwise. Research from the Exit Planning Institute indicates that up to 70-80% of privately held businesses listed for sale do not complete a transaction within 12 months. More telling is … Continue reading

Maximising Your Business Valuation By Fixing Hidden Weaknesses Early

  For many owners, valuation improvement feels like a growth story. Push revenue. Lift margins. Improve EBITDA. Show momentum. Performance matters, of course. But valuation weakens when scrutiny exposes something that should have been dealt with earlier. It drains away in adjustments. In caveats buried in draft heads of terms. In buyer questions that uncover inconsistencies or assumptions no one had written down. A headline number that once looked strong … Continue reading

PE-backed acquisition: Investor, acquirer and target perspectives

Much has been written about the technical process of acquiring or exiting, but very little about the experience of going through a PE-backed acquisition. In 2022, Horizon Capital-backed Dains Accountants acquired Isosceles Finance. So, we decided to ask the target, acquirer, and investor to share their unique perspectives and learnings on going through this acquisition process with the iFD Community. Related Article | Isosceles acquired: The dawn of a new … Continue reading