Sell side — vendor readiness
Preparation starts long before the first conversation with a buyer. The questions to settle: are the last three years consistent, were one-off effects cleanly separated, is the shareholding structure documented?
- Preparation of reliable, consistent multi-year figures
- Normalisation of earnings and a defensible adjusted EBITDA bridge
- Building and maintaining the data room, steering the Q&A process
- Documentation of transfer pricing and intra-group service relationships
- Preparing management for due diligence interviews
Buy side — financial due diligence
- Review of data quality and plausibility of the business plan
- Identification of working capital effects and hidden liabilities
- Assessment of the target's finance organisation
- Integration planning from a commercial view, before signing
After closing
Integration decides whether a transaction pays off. In practice: aligning charts of accounts, merging reporting lines, synchronising close processes and turning two finance teams into one. That is months of line work, not a presentation.
Led the M&A process during the acquisition by the Verve Group as CFO and board member. In a listed medical device group, contributed to the IPO prospectus and supported due diligence through to the acquisition by an international group. Several years in private equity-backed companies with a buy-out background.
Accounting certainty as the basis
Transactions often stall on accounting questions nobody asked in time. Statements under HGB, IFRS and US-GAAP, consolidation experience and familiarity with SOX compliance are the working basis here, not the project goal. More in the profile.