Buyer walked in week five of diligence. Team interviews surfaced what the financials hid: the founder was the only person with vendor relationships, the only signatory on the major customer contracts, and the only one who knew the pricing logic. Buyer concluded the business did not transfer cleanly. Founder is re-launching the mandate after 18 months of COO onboarding and customer-relationship transition.
The lesson
Key-person dependency is invisible in financials and obvious in interviews.
Sourcing
Composite anonymized. Reflects a recurring pattern in distribution and specialty-services businesses where founder centrality, undocumented in the financial record, surfaces decisively during buyer-led team interviews.
The Cordis MRI is the diagnostic Cordis uses with its own clients. The work the founder in this Deal Note did 18 months out (or did not do) is what the MRI surfaces in advance.
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