A buy-side team lives inside the deal. By the time diligence starts in earnest there is a thesis, a model and a timetable, and every new fact gets read against them. That is not a criticism. It is how deals get done. It is also why an independent market read earns its fee: it is paid to ask the questions the room stopped asking weeks ago.
Across engagements, the same three gaps keep turning up.
The headline market size is rarely wrong as arithmetic. It is wrong as a boundary. Confident TAM figures routinely include customers the business cannot reach: the wrong country, the wrong buyer, a price the product has never sold at. Redraw the line around the customers who could actually sign a contract, and the multiple moves. It is unglamorous work with a red pen, and it changes prices.
Growth stories count announcements. Accounts count signatures. The space between the pipeline slide and contracted, renewing revenue is where the optimism lives, and it is the first place a well-advised buyer looks. Renewal behaviour says more about the next three years than any pipeline chart: who came back, at what price, after what kind of year.
Plans tend to assume competitors stand still. They do not. Show a market to be attractive and the price cuts, the copycat products and the distribution deals all turn up ahead of schedule. A plan that ignores the response is not a forecast. It is a bet that nobody else is watching.
A good vendor pack answers all three before the buyer's advisers can raise them. It shows its sources, and it puts the ugly scenario on the page next to the flattering one. That is what makes it credible, and credibility is what lets an investor move quickly. Our pack for KAO DATA helped raise £6.3m from new and existing investors for exactly that reason: the market had already been taken apart before anyone across the table could do it first.
If the analysis always agrees with the asking price, it is not analysis.
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