Most buyers picture the end of a QoE engagement as a PDF landing in their inbox. They open it, skim the executive summary, and assume the next steps are theirs to figure out alone.

While that is the case with some QoE deliveries, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

In practice with Rapid Diligence, delivery works more like a milestone than a finish line. It’s the point where real conversation starts with our team, with your lender, and eventually with the seller. 

Here’s what actually happens between the day you receive the report and the day you close.

The Findings Walkthrough

The QoE delivery email is straightforward: you get the report, along with an invitation to schedule a call once you’ve had a chance to read it. What that call generally looks like depends a lot on how the engagement has gone up to that point.

If we’ve been in close contact throughout the process, which is typical, the report reads as a formal presentation of things you’ve already heard about in earlier conversations. In the case of a buyer who may have been less hands-on, some of the information may be landing for the first time (granted, assuming nothing in it turns out to be a major surprise or a showstopper).

Who’s on the call

With our team usually you’ll be speaking to two people: your dedicated CPA and the deal analyst who worked on your file directly. Together they walk through the findings with you, ready to answer questions.

How to prepare

Because the report is so comprehensive it’s helpful to come prepared to your findings walkthrough. 

  • Reading the full report ahead of time helps. It’s extensive, and starting from page one together on the call would take hours if you were new to the diligence conversation. So it’s better to give your own read through to understand what your priorities and questions are. 
  • Coming in with specific questions tied to what you read tends to work best, even if they’re granular. Even something like: “On slide eight, I saw this. What does it mean for me?” is helpful to help orient the conversation. 
  • The conversation typically centers on implications rather than a recap, for example what a rejected add-back does to EBITDA and what that means for you as the buyer.

How long it runs

Anywhere from fifteen minutes to about ninety, depending on how many questions come up.

Using the Report

What you do with the report next depends on what’s in it. Most buyers loop in their lender, their attorney, or both. 

Interestingly, somewhere between 30 and 35% of clients skip the formal walkthrough call entirely, usually because we’ve already covered the substance during the engagement, they are aware of the findings in advance, and for them there’s not much left to unpack. 

For most clients, questions tend to keep coming back during the process, especially when the findings have materially changed the price or structure of the deal. Buyers may keep returning as their lenders raise their own questions, and we help them work through it.

Where the lender fits in

  • We don’t typically send documents or communicate with a lender directly. Our client relationship is with the buyer, not the lender.
  • If your lender has questions, you bring them to us, and we answer through you.
  • On rare occasions involving an extenuating circumstance, we’ve sent a direct email or joined a call with a lender, but you’d be included on every part of that communication.

Using the Report in Negotiation

This is where a QoE report tends to matter most. Two things typically drive a change in the deal:

  • A change to EBITDA or SDE. This may be due to undisclosed expenses, revenue that wasn’t counted correctly, or add-backs that don’t hold up.
  • A change in the risk profile of the business. Key man risk, or customer concentration that turns out to be more concentrated on one player than it first appeared could all become factors that change the price of the business. 

When something material turns up, preparing you for that conversation is our job as the QoE provider, and honestly what any good QoE provider should do. That means showing everything that was found clearly: what the risks are, how and why it changes pricing, and then getting you ready to actually have that conversation with the seller. Instead of walking in cold, you’ll have the right numbers in hand to justify pricing differences. 

Likely no one wants to hear, four weeks after agreeing on a number, that you now want to pay a million dollars less because of something that was found in diligence. Most sellers understand that diligence surfaces real differences, though, and a conversation grounded in specifics tends to go more productively than one that isn’t.

A few examples of deal changes we’ve witnessed:

  • A legal entity change had caused between $250,000 and $350,000 in revenue to be double-counted. Easy to miss in a business doing $10 to $12 million in revenue, but it led to a $1 million adjustment in purchase price.
  • A business appeared to sell to nine or ten separate customers, however, it turned out three or four of them, representing 70 to 80% of revenue, sat under a single holding company. Technically, that’s still one customer, and it made a material difference to how the deal was priced.
  • An EBITDA add-back for a spouse who works in the business but doesn’t take a salary.
  • A family member quietly holding the one certification in a service or licensed business needs to legally operate, covering it for only a few hours a month. Easy to overlook, and hard to replace, since most people won’t take that kind of specialized, licensed work part time, and hiring someone full time is more than the job needs.

What Support Looks Like After Delivery

This is the part that varies the most, deal to deal. Some clients send a quick thank you and we don’t hear from them again. Others come back for months. The longest engagement we’ve supported ran a full year past delivery.

That long window of support, without an hourly meter running, is one of the things we do differently. Many firms include one call with a CPA and then move everything after that to hourly consulting. We don’t think that matches what most first-time buyers and searchers actually need, especially when a finding has genuinely shifted the price or structure of the deal.

Common questions that come up

  • Working capital adjustments
  • How a change in inventory should affect pricing
  • Lender questions
  • Anything tied to a material finding or a change in deal structure

What Buyers Don’t Expect

Ultimately by using a trusted QoE advisor, you’re walking away with a solid financial outlook, but also our own experiential insight over the years. After enough deals across enough industries and sub-sectors, patterns start to repeat, especially with clients we’ve worked with more than once. We’re able to share and flag industry risks, commercial risks, and operational risks when it comes up because we are invested beyond delivering a report. We genuinely want to see the continued success of the acquisition. 

To give you a few examples: one client doing repeat healthcare roll-ups mentioned, in conversation after a deal closed, how much more complicated insurance and medical coding turned out to be than expected, and how much that affects accounts receivable. That’s part of our knowledge base now. When we see a client buying a similar business, we’ll flag what to watch for or to check whether there’s someone on staff equipped to handle insurance calls and coding. If not, we know now that’s something you’ll need to take on yourself or hire for, and can suggest it. 

None of this is technically included in the QoE scope. When it’s something we know, though, we’ll always disclose it if it helps the deal. 

The Bigger Picture

The report is the formal record of what we found. Everything that happens after (the questions, the lender conversations, the negotiation with the seller, the months of follow-up) is where that work actually gets used. That’s the part of the engagement most buyers don’t see coming, and it’s the part we think matters most.

If you’re heading toward a QoE and want to know what the process looks like on the other side of delivery, we have free consultations with our team to help you explore your options.