The best ideas from 30+ top podcasts, every week.
7 quotes from 1 episode on M&A Science, each with a timestamped link to the source.
Greg Holbrock models due diligence on the discipline of a financial audit. Tracing a financial correction across every business model prevents valuation errors and ensures the transaction works for future minority investors.
Winsupply abandons financially sound transactions if the deal terms fail to support future minority investors.
“Winsupply walks away from a lot of deals that make financial sense we just cannot figure out how to how to make it work for that minority investor in the future…”
Internal audit discipline treats the acquisition target as an entire universe requiring continuous monitoring.
“In the world of audit, you have an audit universe…”
Early diligence activities functioned strictly as simple checklists.
“Early on in my career when I kind of started in the diligence activities everything was like a checklist…”
Greg Holbrock explained that catching an error during an audit requires tracing the finding and correcting the metric in every place the number appears. This discipline catches compounded errors before signing.
“In an audit, if you have a finding and you have to go in later and correct it and you had a financial finding, you've got to go back and correct it in every place that you had that financial metric listed…”
Consolidating diligence files into a central platform creates concrete value. Centralizing this information removes data silos and preserves findings for operations after the transaction closes.
“I think the biggest value prop is you don't have data segregated in multiple areas…”
Greg Holbrock emphasized the requirement to verify the facts presented during a deal. Evaluating raw operational records prevents sellers from presenting manufactured metrics.
“The big thing with audit is how do you trust and verify…”
“…how do we trust but verify all the information that's getting thrown out there.”
How we attribute quotes. Every quote was matched against the episode transcript, so the words and the timestamp are real (we trim filler words like "um", nothing else). The name comes from our written summary of the episode, and we use it only when a separate check of the captions finds that person on the episode. YouTube gives us no voice-by-voice transcript, so open the timestamp to hear who is talking. See a wrong name? Tell us and we fix or remove it.
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