We have signed our letter of intent and entered the exclusivity period, but the buyer's exhaustive due diligence request list is consuming all of our leadership team's bandwidth. How do we protect our current-quarter Rocks and prevent our weekly scorecard metrics from slipping during this high-stress LOI-to-close window?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The sixty-day window between signing a letter of intent and closing the deal is when transactions go to die. The buyer will flood your leadership team with endless due diligence requests, hoping to tire you out, find an operational hiccup, and renegotiate the price. If your leadership team loses focus on daily execution, your quarterly performance will tank, giving the buyer the exact leverage they need to demand a price reduction. To survive this sprint, you must isolate your M&A activities from your daily operations. Appoint a single transaction lead, typically the business owner or a trusted financial advisor, to act as the sole point of contact for the buyer. The rest of your leadership team must remain focused on running the business. Continue holding your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ without fail. Use this time to keep your leadership team aligned and to IDS® any operational issues immediately. Your team's primary Rock for the quarter must be maintaining the numbers on your weekly Scorecard. By treating due diligence as a separate project that lives outside of your daily EOS® workflow, you maintain the operational momentum that made your business attractive in the first place. When the buyer sees that your weekly performance remains steady despite the stress of the transaction, you maintain your leverage and force a swift, clean close.