A €900m ecommerce business. 5.5 million customers. The revenue distribution is not what the headline metrics suggest.
21% of customers generate 66% of revenue.
One competitor move, one range change. The multiple is resting on 21% of the base. The headline does not show that.
Infrequent, big-basket buyers: 16% of revenue, 2 to 3 orders a year.
They look like churn risk. They are not. Stable, high-value buyers with a consistent spend pattern - and standard models routinely misread them.
Regular, low-spend buyers: highest frequency, lowest value.
The largest group by count. Lights up every engagement metric. Almost no economic upside - and the risk is over-investing to grow them.
Most growth is coming in weak.
6.5 low-value new customers for every high-value one. The growth number looks good. The mix underneath it is getting worse.
Revenue grew 12%. But tracking what actually happened to the highest-value customers told a different story.
€87m
Unreplaced revenue from high-value customer attrition. The gap the headline never showed.
+32%
Potential growth with full retention of the highest-value base. Reported growth: 12%.
The same methodology, now applied to diligence
- Used at entry to test whether the revenue line is strong enough to underwrite.
- During hold to track whether the thesis is playing out at customer level.
- At exit to build the customer durability story before a buyer's DD team asks for it.
Three steps. Days not weeks. No PII required.
Access
An anonymised transaction extract from the portfolio company. No PII. No disruption to the business. We confirm that the data is usable before the engagement formally starts, so there are no surprises on scope or timeline.
Analyse
We work at individual customer level across every transaction, not cohort averages or modelled proxies. That produces a complete picture of which customers are actually driving the revenue, how concentrated that dependency is, and what has already changed that the reported numbers have not caught yet.
Extract
A clear commercial verdict: what revenue is structurally supported, what is already on weaker footing, and the single most important action before or after close. The output is legible to the operating partner, the deal team partner, the portfolio company CMO, and the portfolio company CFO.
FAQs
Because data describes the past. Diligence is a question about the future. Someone who has run customer acquisition, retention and pricing inside a live business knows which signals are leading indicators and which are lagging artefacts. That judgement cannot be modelled. It has to be earned.
See what your customer base is really made of
Days not weeks. Fixed scope. No PII required.
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