Most deals are priced before anyone on the buy side has seen the org chart. We map the target's leadership, bench depth and key-person exposure from outside data, while you can still change the price, the structure or the integration plan.
If you can understand the organization in one management meeting, you don't need an outside read. It's worth the cost when the investment thesis depends on people you can't see yet.
The read shows whether that team can run the business and absorb the next acquisitions, and where it depends on one or two people.
It works the same way when you're combining businesses you already own. You see where teams overlap, where leadership is thin and which groups the new structure leans on.
Financial, legal, commercial and environmental diligence run on records the seller has to produce. Workforce diligence depends on records the seller decides when to release: HR systems, org charts, compensation, succession plans.
That access rarely opens before exclusivity. In the meantime the synergy model, the integration plan and the retention budget get built around an organization the buyer hasn't looked at.
We keep a graph of licensed career-history data, cross-checked against public filings and licensing records. Each pattern we flag gets four parts: what the data shows, what we calculated, what it could mean, and what to ask management.
Illustrative example built from a composite. It isn't a real client.
We built an outside read of a business of about 270 people, bought in 2026 by a $2B+ industrial company, using no internal data. The buyer's M&A lead went through it finding by finding and compared each one with what he knew from the deal. Where the graph was wrong, he told us, and we logged it.
Every report now includes a page listing the corrections a client gave us, before any confirmatory work starts.
Pick the depth that fits the time you have before LOI.
A quick pass on the two or three signals most likely to matter, plus questions for your next management call.
The full structural analysis, a market map for seats that would be hard to refill, and an integration approach for each business unit.
We check phase 1 against real org data once HR or management access opens, and log every correction.
Six parts that together make a working document for your first management session.
Every finding carries one of five labels showing how we got to it.
Functional VPs and executive teams use the same read to look at the teams they already run. It starts from outside data, so nobody has to pull an HR export to get going.
Legal and IT usually ask about this first, so here is the short version.
The AI models are available to anyone. Most of the effort goes into the data. It has to be licensed and cleaned, the same person has to be matched across sources, thousands of job titles have to be standardized, and someone has to judge where coverage is too thin to trust. Then the same method has to run on every deal so each target can be compared with the wider market.
For something most deal teams need a few times a year, that build rarely pays back. We're happy to walk your team through the method either way.
No. Phase 1 uses licensed career-history data, public filings and licensing records, so the target doesn't need to be involved. Phase 2 uses management or HR data, and only once you already have access.
No. Licensed career data is one input. We cross-check it against filings and licensing records, label every finding by how it was derived, and write it up as a diligence document.
Each finding is labeled by how it was derived, so you can see how much weight it carries. When the data can't answer something, the report says so and moves it to phase 2 or to the questions for management.
Yes. When you're combining businesses you already own, the same read shows where teams overlap, where leadership is thin and which groups the new structure depends on.
Usually corporate development or a PE deal partner, before LOI. HR and integration leads tend to join for phase 2, when the findings feed the day-one plan.
Coverage is deepest where we recruit: energy and industrial services, especially oilfield services, completions and related technical fields.
Name a completed acquisition or combination your team knows well. We run the outside read without your input, then you score what we found against what actually happened. No live deal is involved.