Deal teams, operating partners, and advisers who need management's operating claims checked against the record before signing.
Before an investment, a deal team sees the company largely through management's account. Cerenovus reads the data room and approved sources, tests each operating claim against the documents behind it, and sizes the value creation upside early. The investment committee sees which claims the records support, which they contradict, and what is still open.
Questions this review answers
What a deal team needs answered from the records themselves, claim by claim.
- 01
Can current capacity, staffing, and systems deliver the growth in management's plan?
- 02
Which operating claims do the documents contradict, and which can nobody yet verify?
- 03
Do management's claims about key people and customer concentration hold up in the records?
- 04
How much operating upside can be sized from the data room before the price is set?
What Cerenovus typically finds
Where management's account and the records most often part ways, and where the upside sits. Each finding is cited and states what remains unverified.
Capacity claims the records do not support
Order backlogs, overtime, and shift patterns show the operation already near its limit, while the plan assumes growth on today's headcount and equipment.
System rollouts that are not finished
Management describes the new system as live everywhere, while invoices, exports, and email show some sites still working in the old one, or in spreadsheets beside it.
Teams pulling against the growth plan
Management presents one growth plan. Commission plans, discount approvals, and email show sales paid on volume while operations and finance are held to margin, so the teams pull in opposite directions.
Key-person claims the inboxes contradict
The presentation says no one person is critical. Approvals, replies, and file edits show pricing, the largest accounts, or a plant's schedule handled by one employee, with work stalling whenever that person is away.
Concentration behind a broad base
The presentation lists many active accounts. Invoices and order history show most of the margin coming from a few of them, or supply depending on a single vendor.
Operating upside, sized before pricing
Production schedules rebuilt by hand each week, reporting compiled twice by different teams, and expediting that better planning would avoid. Each is sized as a range from named inputs before the price is set.
5 steps from question to decision
The review starts from management's claims and ends with a ledger the deal team can defend.
- 01
List management's operating claims
- 02
Read the data room and approved sources
- 03
Mark each claim supported, contradicted, or open
- 04
Size the upside and state the gaps
- 05
Deal team takes the ledger to committee
What your team receives
Material for the committee meeting, with each claim one click from the evidence behind it.
Claims workbook
Every operating claim in management's case, marked supported, contradicted, or open, with linked evidence for and against it and the missing sources that would settle each open one.
Early value creation plan
Opportunities visible in the data room, ranked and sized as ranges from named inputs, so the deal team can weigh the upside before pricing and carry it past closing.
Investment committee deck
The contradicted claims, the questions to put to management, and the sized upside, laid out in the deal team's own committee format.
The deal team decides which contradicted claims change the price or the conditions, and which open ones go back to management. The investment committee decides whether to invest.
Start the next diligence from the records
Cerenovus reads approved company data through read-only access and ranks what it finds by value.