Buyers look under the hood now

The polished management meeting is no longer where agency deals are won. Buyers have learned to look underneath.

The traditional process let a founder control the story: buyer meets the two founders, maybe a board member or two, talks to a couple of hand-picked clients during due diligence, and never sees below the top slice. Deals done that way kept failing, because the thing being bought (the team, the culture, the machine that does the work) was never actually inspected.

So serious buyers changed their approach. When we acquire, we offer the target a full strategy day as a gift: a proper workshop with their best people, building a three-year plan. They get real value from the day whether or not a deal happens. We get to see the quality of the team with the polish off. Secret-shopper enquiries are routine now too, and I would call them entirely legitimate. And your clients will take the diligence calls; big clients are used to them and speak candidly.

Which means the only reliable strategy left is the obvious one: be genuinely good under the hood. Depth of talent beyond the founders. A team that could run the place if the top three vanished. Clients who volunteer that the agency would survive without you.

None of that can be staged in the month before a process starts. It gets built deliberately. That is the work I do as a board advisor.