Find it before the buyer does
A buyer's diligence team will normalize your EBITDA, test your working capital, and ask why revenue is recognized the way it is. Whatever they find becomes a price adjustment, an escrow, or a reason to walk. I have spent twenty-five years being that team. Whether you are a fund exiting a portfolio company or an owner selling the business you built, I take the sell side from preparation through close as one engagement.
Sell-side quality of earnings
Your numbers, tested the way a buyer will test them, with the adjustments documented and defensible. Working capital normalized so the peg is established before someone else establishes it for you. A close calendar and a clean chart of accounts behind it, so the reporting holds up as well as the numbers do.
The data room and the process
I build the data room, manage the buyer's request list, and answer the diligence questions as they come. Your controller keeps running the business instead of the process, and the buyer gets consistent answers rather than three versions of the same one.
Through to close
Management prepared for the meetings. Purchase price and working capital mechanics reviewed before they are agreed, and the closing statement checked when it arrives. And if the honest answer is that you are two years early, I will tell you that rather than take the engagement.
When the fund is the seller
An exit is where a portfolio company's finance function gets audited in public. The deal team is stretched, the portfolio CFO has usually never run a sell-side process, and every request that sits unanswered costs momentum and leverage. I run that side of it.
Carve-outs and standalone financials
When what you are selling is a division rather than a whole company: standalone pro forma financials, separation scope, and the transition-services schedule the buyer will price.
Your CFO supported, not replaced
The portfolio CFO keeps running the business. I take the process — the request list, the coordination across workstreams, and the analyses the buyer's team asks for on two days' notice.
What the buy-side will find
I have been the buyer's diligence team on deals from $30M to $30B. I know which adjustments survive scrutiny and which get struck, and I would rather you hear it from me than from the other side of the table.