Revenue truth, before it gets priced into the deal
The read that tells you whether the customer base will hold up, before you price the deal.
A behavioural diagnostic of customer-base health, delivered in five days from clean data. The Health Check gives PE deal teams a decision-useful read on revenue quality - before formal processes begin.
Before you commission six weeks of CDD, get five days of full-data customer base evidence. If the base is healthy, you proceed with confidence. If it is not, you save the CDD spend and the deal team time.
The Problem This Solves
Five days to decision-useful data
Most deal flow filters rely on management accounts, the CIM and a handful of commercial conversations. None of these tells the deal team whether the customer base is healthy or quietly eroding.
The Health Check answers that question in five days, on full transaction data, before the deal team commits the much larger budget that formal CDD requires.
The Output
What the Health Check surfaces
Which customers the revenue is actually resting on, and whether the base is structured around a durable core or a vulnerable concentration.
How that dependency is distributed, and the difference between a base that can absorb pressure and one that cannot.
Whether recent customer growth is coming in at high or low value relative to the existing base.
The proportion of revenue that is structurally supported versus already at risk.
What percentage of revenue comes from improving, stable, and deteriorating customer segments.
A directional read on whether the base is strengthening or weakening.
The single most important implication for the investment thesis.
Format: Structured written report with visualisations. Presented in a 60-minute walkthrough with the deal team.
When to commission
1. Pre-deal screening
You have identified a target. The customer base is central to the investment thesis - ecommerce, subscription, consumer, financial services, retail. You need a quick, evidence-based read before committing to formal processes.
2. Specialist layer within broader advisory
You are leading a broader advisory engagement and the customer-base question requires specialist behavioural depth that sits outside your team's methodology.
Product summary
| Price | Scoped to complexity and data volume |
| Duration | Five days from clean data to delivery |
| Deal moment | Initial screening (deal flow filter), or specialist layer within formal CDD |
| Output | Behavioural diagnostic of the current health of the target's customer base. Decision-useful read on whether to commit further deal resource. No financial value attached. |
| Data required | Anonymised transaction extract. No PII. |
| Presentation | 60-minute deal team walkthrough included |
How it leads to the Diagnostic
The Health Check is often the first engagement in a longer relationship. If the deal proceeds, the full Customer Base Diagnostic extends the analysis into year-on-year movement tracking, forward scenario projections, and hold-period intelligence. Commission a Health Check during screening, then upgrade to the full Diagnostic once the portfolio company is acquired - using the same data infrastructure and analyst relationship.
Learn about the Customer Base Diagnostic →FAQs
We need 12 or more months of anonymised, individual-level transaction data - typically extracted from the target company's CRM, ecommerce platform, or billing system. We provide a data specification template at the scoping stage.
Most advisory processes model the customer base using averages, assumed probability distributions, or survey-based proxies. The Health Check uses observed behavioural data at the individual customer level - actual purchasing frequency, spend, breadth, and recency - to segment the base by what customers are doing, not what models predict they should do.
Yes. If transaction-level data is available in the data room, we can scope directly from it. If not, we work with the target company via the deal team or advisory lead to extract what is needed.
The Health Check is most relevant for businesses where the customer base is the central revenue driver: ecommerce, subscription, streaming, loyalty, financial services, and retail.
Timeline depends primarily on data readiness. If clean data is available on day one, delivery within five working days is standard. Accelerated timelines can be discussed at scoping.
Find out how we can help
Five days from clean data to a decision-useful read on revenue quality. Fixed scope. No PII required.
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