Due Diligence - Sellers

While diligence is ostensibly the buyer’s process, it typically is a bigger deal to the seller, who should take pains to manage the process closely. This is because wide-open diligence poses any number of problems to sellers:

- Disclosing sensitive information (often to a bitter competitor)
- Consuming management time
- Dragging on without end

As a seller, you’re highly motivated to limit the scope of review and the time buyers have to review the information. You don’t want to waste time and resources turning everything over, particularly if you know the documents are of marginal utility to the other side. It helps to try to think like the buyer and anticipate which of your information would be most useful to them, even if it’s not exactly what they’ve asked for.

You also don’t want to make your executives available for endless meetings and diligence sessions with buyers. Savvy buyers know that such meetings are not typically very helpful, particularly with public companies, and will be fine with keeping them brief. With others, you will need to set limits on availability, and be sure that the questions are appropriate for the senior exec involved. There’s nothing like seeing a slack-jawed head of marketing getting grilled about the intricacies of last year’s advertising budget . . .

And then, of course, there is the sensitive stuff. What’s important here is to keep things in perspective. Yes, it can get the hackles up to see your competitor rifling through your secrets. On the other hand, not everything marked “confidential” is worthy of considering thusly. Use this simple test: If your competitor doesn’t buy you, and violates the NDA and tries to use the info against you, what’s the worst they can do? For the vast majority of so-called "confidential" info the answer is: Precious little. Share freely if it’s painless to do so. For the truly sensitive stuff, consider providing it later in the diligence process once things have turned serious. You can even redact or simply tell the buyer it’s too sensitive to share (this last move is best used with care, as it can easily blow trivial documents far out of proportion to their meaning in the context of the deal).

Finally, while buyers would be content doing diligence 'till the cows come home, sellers are wise to put time limits on the process. The amount of time will depend on number of bidders and deal leverage, but setting boundaries is key. Naturally, you will not want to let diligence push on past signing unless it is limited to specific integration matters (and isn't set up as a closing condition).

There are far more intricies to how sellers handle the diligence process, from document copying to using multi-party diligence to further an auction process. I'll try to cover some of those in later posts.