Private Equity

At diligence, connect the data room. Add-backs, working capital claims, and revenue quality get read against the documents behind them, not against the deck.

The IC sees which parts of the story the record supports and which rest on management assertion. The price gets set on what the record proves.

At close, connect the portfolio company systems you approve: ledgers, contracts, tickets, email, meeting notes. Cerenovus reconciles the names and the numbers: the vendor master, the customer entities, the figures that differ between the ledger and the reporting pack.

Every fact traces to a verbatim quote with page-level anchors, and a quote that cannot be found in the source never enters the record. A signed contract beats a newer hearsay note, and a genuine tie surfaces as a dispute.

What diligence learned does not get archived with the closing binder. The findings, the assumptions, and the commitments management made in the process carry into the hold with their sources attached.

Deal teams change and operating partners rotate; the record does not. Year one’s underwriting assumptions stay on file next to year three’s results, so the value creation plan is measured against what was actually promised.

The standing deliverables land at the portfolio company: the Shadow Org Chart of who actually runs the place, the Key-Person Risk Map of what leaves if one person does, the Operating Brief of what changed this period and what it costs.

Each is ranked biggest impact first, every line cited. The board pack argument ends where the citation begins.

The watch runs continuously across the hold: covenant headroom against the live ledger, KPIs against their baselines, working capital against its own seasonality. When a number starts drifting toward a threshold, the fund hears about it months early, not at the quarterly board meeting.

Cerenovus sweeps for operational inefficiency at the same time: duplicate payments, missed early-pay discounts, price variance across the vendor master. EBITDA findings arrive without anyone commissioning a review.

Every finding is challenged before it reaches the deal team or the IC. Nothing is silently dropped.

Every dollar figure arrives with the calculation and the sources behind it. The number in the board deck holds up in the buyer’s diligence two years later.

When an LP asks how a portfolio company is really performing, or a board member questions a number, the answer comes back in minutes with receipts, not after a week of the deal team digging. Every claim opens downward until the original document.

The record also states what it cannot answer yet. A coverage report shows what share of the record has been read and what remains unknown, before the gap becomes a question the fund cannot answer.

Diligence findings became the value creation baseline, the baseline became the monitoring record, and the monitoring record becomes the exit story with receipts already attached.

The buyer’s diligence finds a company that proves its own history. That is the difference between defending a number and citing one.