“This is a great business, but the quality of its existing financials means the deal would likely fall apart.”
As preparation for a transaction begins, the quality of the finance function can become just as important as the underlying performance of the business. Reporting may be inconsistent, historical data difficult to reconcile or forecasts insufficiently supported. The business itself may be performing well, but weaknesses in the financial information would quickly undermine buyer confidence and put the transaction at risk if Due Diligence started before these problems were fixed.
InfiniteCFO works alongside many corporate finance teams and their clients to close that gap, adding the senior finance leadership, capacity and transaction experience needed to strengthen the financial foundations before they become an obstacle to the deal.
Many businesses coming to market have grown faster than their finance functions. Investment has gone into sales, product, technology and people, while finance has focused on keeping day-to-day operations running. As a result, reporting, systems and processes often don’t keep pace with the scale and complexity of the business.
A sale process adds significant demands: historical analysis, data-room preparation, financial modelling and detailed buyer questions, all alongside business-as-usual responsibilities.
Even where there is a capable internal finance team, transaction experience is often limited. Preparing management accounts for internal use is a different discipline to creating financials that need to survive a quality-of-earnings review and which hold up against buyer scrutiny on customer and product-line profitability.
In a recent project staff costs sat entirely in overheads, so nobody could say with confidence which customers or service lines were actually profitable, and 2 overseas subsidiaries had no reportable financials.
Situations like this create significant transaction risk. Inconsistent reporting, unreliable data or unsupported forecasts make it harder to present and defend a credible investment story. They can slow responses, absorb management time and expose weaknesses during due diligence. If management can’t clearly explain profitability, cash generation or the assumptions behind its forecast, buyers may also question how well the company understands and controls its own performance.
InfiniteCFO works alongside the corporate finance team and the company’s existing finance function, bringing the capacity, senior oversight and transaction experience needed to support the process. We’re honest about what needs fixing to enable a successful process, and we’re doers, not consultants: we roll our sleeves up, become an extension of the in-house team and fix issues as we find them.
We can provide CFO-level leadership where additional senior finance capability is needed, work alongside the existing leadership team, perform pre-deal remedial work and take ownership of transaction-specific finance, and/or step into day-to-day finance activity so the internal team has more time to focus on the deal. Often it’s a combination. We flex our role around the strength and capacity of the existing team, the work required and the stage of the transaction.
For corporate finance advisers, this delivers the skills and capacity without blurring responsibilities. Your team can stay independent and focused on positioning, buyer engagement, negotiation and process management, while we take on the hands-on finance work behind the transaction – from reconciliations and data cleansing to model preparation and financial analysis.
Once the key risks are understood, we focus on the financial work needed to support the transaction. Depending on the business, this can include:
Additional value comes from the experience behind our work: anticipating where buyers and due diligence providers will focus, identifying gaps early and making sure the numbers and assumptions stand up to scrutiny.
The result is a coherent, buyer-ready view of the business, supported by robust data which provides strong foundations for the investment story.
Ideally, InfiniteCFO becomes involved at least three to six months before a transaction formally launches. That gives us time to embed within the finance team, identify weaknesses and gradually take on workload. By the time buyer scrutiny intensifies, management and the internal finance team have more capacity to support the process and the key financial information has already been tested.
Our approach is simple: Embed, Deliver, Hand back. We embed alongside the CF team and internal finance team, deliver the work required to get the business transaction-ready, then hand back stronger reporting, models and processes that the internal team can continue to use.
We can also step into transactions that are already under pressure. But resolving weaknesses before the process begins is far less disruptive than repairing the financial foundations once deadlines are tight and buyer confidence has already been tested.
For corporate finance teams, you gain an experienced finance partner working collaboratively with the company, strengthening the information behind your investment story and removing avoidable obstacles before they threaten the process. And for the business, the likelihood of a successful process improves, alongside a much clearer understanding of its own numbers.
