Nineteen bids. Two thousand investor questions. A finance team of six that nearly broke before the deal was done.
That is what one exit process did to a CFO I spoke to recently, the finance chief of a global payments fintech. He is measured and experienced, the sort of person who does not exaggerate. When he described the diligence phase, at a previous company that went through a competitive sale, he did not talk about valuation or multiples. He talked about his people.
We got 19 bids. We had about 2,000 questions come through to us from potential investors, which was a huge strain on the finance team, and the finance team was six of us, really. I had the easy job of being in the meeting room, presenting the packs. It was the questions afterwards that went back to my team, and it nearly broke a couple of people. It was just too much.
CFO, global payments fintech · ABCL research interview
This is the part of an exit nobody warns you about. The sale gets told in headlines and returns. What it costs the finance function to get there stays private. So let me tell it plainly, because if you run finance in a business with an exit in its future, this is your risk long before it is your reward.
The process does not test your numbers. It tests your team.
Most finance leaders prepare for diligence as an accounting exercise. Get the audit clean, tidy the reconciliations, brace for a hard look at the figures. That work is necessary. It is nowhere near sufficient.
A competitive process is a stress test of capacity, not accuracy. Nineteen bidders means nineteen sets of questions, each with its own logic, each on its own clock. Two thousand questions is not a number you answer once. It is a queue that refills faster than a small team can clear it, for weeks, on top of the job of running the business. And it was not naivety about the numbers that hurt. It was that nobody had been through it before, so nobody knew what was coming.
The damage is rarely a wrong figure. It is a good team, doing good work, asked to sustain a pace no team can sustain while the day job does not pause. What stayed with him afterwards was not the deal. It was the cost to two of his people, and the fact that he had not seen it coming in time to protect them.
I do feel I still remain feeling guilty about that process, and the impact it had on a couple of people. So, not going to do that again.
CFO, global payments fintech · ABCL research interview
Four disciplines that turn a crisis into a process
Here is the useful part. The pain is not inevitable. The same CFO now runs four disciplines that would have changed that experience, and every one of them can be built now, in the quiet, long before a banker is appointed.
1. No surprises
Ask him what protects credibility and he goes straight back to one idea.
I still go back to surprises. I don’t like surprises.
CFO, global payments fintech · ABCL research interview
An investor does not lose confidence because a business has a weakness. Every business has weaknesses. They lose confidence when one surfaces halfway through diligence that finance did not flag first. Find your own problems, name them, put the fix on the record before anyone asks. A known issue with a plan attached is a footnote. The same issue found by a bidder is a price chip.
2. Lead with the operational story, then the financial implication
Numbers on their own invite suspicion. A margin moved, but why. Revenue dipped, but what happened. His rule is to explain the operational cause first and let the financial consequence follow.
If you just say revenue’s off, it looks like it’s a finance problem. If you say we’ve sold less, and therefore we’ve less time to catch up, people go, okay, I get it. So always try to lead with the operational things that are happening, and then the financial implications of that.
CFO, global payments fintech · ABCL research interview
Do that and the number stops being a question. It becomes evidence of a team that understands its own business. That is what buys trust in the room. Not the figure. The command of what sits behind it.
3. Keep a data book as business as usual
This is the single highest-leverage habit, and almost nobody does it before they need it. He does it now as routine.
We have a data book of our KPIs set up, so we can just add to it as we go along. We’re not scrambling around in preparation for it. Making it a business-as-usual activity, having your data in good shape, is ideal preparation.
CFO, global payments fintech · ABCL research interview
Maintain a living record of your key metrics, defined consistently, updated as routine, all year. Not for a deal. For yourself. Do this and the data room stops being a project and becomes an export. The business that keeps the data book current walks into diligence with the hardest part already done. The business that starts from a blank page when the process opens spends its first month building what it should have had all along, at exactly the moment it has no spare capacity to build anything.
4. Resource six months ahead of the process
A six-person team cannot absorb a nineteen-bid process on top of its normal load. That is not a failing. It is arithmetic. His conclusion, drawn the hard way, is to decide early that the process needs its own resource.
Next time, with that knowledge, I’ll know that six months in advance of something happening, I’ll get an extra pair of hands in for a period, to take the strain off the day to day.
CFO, global payments fintech · ABCL research interview
Whether it is an extra pair of hands, an external partner, or a defined internal reallocation, the decision has to be made while there is still time to make it calmly. Six months ahead, not six weeks into the pain.
The work happens now, or it happens in crisis
None of these four disciplines is complicated. Every one of them is hard to build once the clock is running. That is the whole point. Exit readiness is not a phase you enter when a sale appears on the horizon. It is a standard you hold in ordinary time, so that when the process arrives, it is an export and not an emergency.
If you run finance in a business with an exit in its future, the honest question is not whether your numbers are right today. It is whether your team could survive the process of proving them. The time to answer that is now, while the answer still costs you a decision and not your best people.
Two ways to find out where you stand
Take the Board Readiness Assessment for a fast, private read on how your finance function would hold up under investor scrutiny. Or book a Board Readiness Review, a confidential thirty minutes, finance leader to finance leader, no pitch, to talk through what to build before a process ever begins.
