5 articles
Operations & Processes
The mechanisms, review criteria, and decision patterns that determine how this area is underwritten, governed, and priced.
- 01May 18, 20267 minThe Core Process Map: Can the Company Itself Explain How the Work Gets Done?A core process map is not a paper description of operations but evidence that the work can proceed independently of any particular person. What a diligence team looks for is not a flow diagram; it is whether the same work produces the same result through different hands. Where that cannot be shown, the gap is closed not in the multiple but in the structure of the transaction.
- 02May 17, 20267 minProcess KPIs: The Distance Between a Company That Measures Outcomes and One That Can Reproduce ThemMost companies measure outcomes but not the process that produces them; revenue, margin, and collection days fall out of the accounting system, while the performance of the steps generating those results remains a matter of founder observation. On the diligence table, that gap becomes a question about whether the projection has an operational foundation, and it surfaces directly in deal structure.
- 03May 17, 20267 minProcess Owners: What the Question of Who Actually Runs the Company Is Worth at ValuationA company whose processes function is not the same as a company whose processes have a defined owner; what the diligence table looks for is not the flow itself, but whether the flow remains repeatable once the person carrying it changes. Unowned processes rarely reach valuation through price — they reach it through closing structure.
- 04May 17, 20268 minService Level Targets: The Gap Between the Time Promised and the Time MeasuredA service level target reveals whether a company has converted a customer-facing time commitment into an internally measurable obligation. What a review table looks for is not the existence of the target but the identity of whoever acts when it is missed; absent that mechanism, the target remains a sentence written for sales purposes.
- 05May 17, 20268 minSOP Coverage: The Gap Between the Written Procedure and the Process That Actually RunsThere is no reliable relationship between the volume of a procedure set and the auditability of an operation. What matters at the review table is not how many procedures were written, but whether the processes that actually determine margin and delivery schedule are documented, owned, and evidenced by a record.