Investment bankers usually prepare the data rooms for due diligence in M&A transactions. Shelves full of information that is usually summarized in an information memorandum. I never found these summaries very useful. It is impossible to create a financial picture in hour head from just reading text with data. "Last year's sales were x, growth for the 3rd quarter was y, the company is doing business in 3 product segments." The only way to understand this is to extract the information and put it in tables or graphs to see what is going on.

And that is most of the times exactly what the buying side will do, hire a consultant/analyst to go through the material and start creating these charts, then someone more senior will go through the charts and select which ones are important, and which ones not.

You can accelerate the sales process by anticipating all of this, and do some of the homework of the buy side. In the process, you can spoon feed them the right insights you want them to have.

Similar but unrelated, this is also why wordy descriptions of company results in newspaper articles do not work for me. The journalist took the data tables and graphs and translated them into words, the exact opposite direction of where I want her to go.


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