Twenty-four questions on whether your business is built to buy other businesses.
Most acquisitions that disappoint do not fail on the target. They fail on the buyer: diligence that missed something, numbers underwritten on the seller's assumptions, an integration nobody had capacity for, a governance process that worked for one deal and broke on the third.
This walks the six areas that determine whether you buy well and repeatedly. You answer, you see how a seller, a lender or a capital partner reads that answer, and at the end you get a score, the two areas where the highest-leverage work sits, and what closing them involves.
It applies whether you have done twenty deals or two. If a term is unfamiliar, the tool explains it as you go.
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Fifteen to twenty minutes. You can go back at any point.
Before you begin
Beyond the financial diligence, the things that most often cause problems afterwards are customer concentration, whether key contracts survive a change of ownership, how much depends on the outgoing owner, and whether the working capital that comes with the business is normal or has been managed down before the sale.
Enough that you are underwriting your own numbers rather than the seller's. The cost of diligence scales with deal size but the categories do not change much. Running the same process every time, written down, is what separates buyers who improve deal on deal from buyers who start fresh each time.
This is the question most acquirers answer too late. Integration work lands on the existing finance team unless someone is specifically assigned to it, and a team already at capacity will deprioritise it. Deciding this before closing rather than after is one of the clearest differences between acquirers who scale and acquirers who stall.
An acquirer who finds a deal first and raises the money for it afterwards, rather than holding a committed fund. It is a common structure for smaller acquisitions, and it puts more weight on being able to show investors a credible process.
Usually a combination: senior debt against the target's cash flow, seller financing, and equity raised deal by deal. The practical constraint is time, because raising per deal is slower and sellers weigh certainty of closing heavily.
Most disappointing acquisitions do not fail on the target. They fail on the buyer: diligence that missed something, numbers underwritten on the seller's assumptions, an integration nobody had capacity for, or a governance process that worked for one deal and broke on the third.
Look at your own finance function first. If you cannot produce combined numbers across what you already own, or see cash across the group, adding an acquisition makes that harder rather than easier.
A few of the questions and inputs you will see. Your answers and results stay in the diagnostic.
Use the Buy-Side Readiness Index to make a directional read of your business. This is not a lender quote, valuation opinion or commissioned diligence report.
Provide your details and work through 24 questions across six areas. Allow about 20 minutes; your pace may vary.
Choose the answer that describes your current position. The commentary explains how a capital partner could read your answers in the section summaries and final read.
Read readiness scores. The output is indicative, not a formal quote or verified diligence opinion.
Review the recommended actions where gaps qualify. If no areas need remediation, maintain the evidence and revisit the read when your circumstances change.
Choose the next question you want to examine:
The Buy-Side Readiness Index applies a six-dimension framework measuring acquirer institutional readiness across the dimensions that determine sustained execution quality, capital partner credibility, and post-close integration capacity.
Acquirer Finance Architecture measures the finance infrastructure supporting acquisition activity including reporting integration capacity, treasury operations across the platform, systems infrastructure for multi-entity consolidation, and finance team capability for diligence support and post-close integration.
Diligence Playbook Maturity measures the institutional documentation of the acquirer's diligence methodology including standardized scope, work-paper templates, time-boxing discipline, and learning capture from prior transactions.
Underwriting Framework Discipline measures the consistency and defensibility of the acquirer's underwriting methodology including model standardization, downside calibration, sensitivity analysis discipline, and return threshold documentation.
Integration Capacity measures the acquirer's institutional capability to integrate acquired businesses including finance integration playbooks, reporting standardization, treasury integration discipline, and 90 to 180 day post-close measurement against underwriting baseline.
Capital Structure and Platform Readiness measures the acquirer's capital architecture including equity reserves, debt capacity, follow-on financing capability, and lender relationship depth.
Acquisition Governance measures the institutional discipline applied to acquisition decisions including authority matrices, committee structures, board approval workflows, and decision documentation.
Each dimension scored 0 to 100 based on responses to four questions per dimension (24 questions total). Composite score produces band placement: Not Yet Institutional (0–25), Transitioning (26–50), Institutional (51–75), Institutionally Mature (76–100).
The composite read indicates how your acquisition process is prepared for a capital partner's scrutiny. Dimension scores identify the weaker areas when a gap qualifies, with practical actions and indicative timelines. This diagnostic does not predict credit pricing or seller acceptance.
This is a self-assessment based on your answers, not a substitute for examining transaction records and your capacity to integrate an acquisition.
Sector multiples, adjustment ranges and stress factors in this tool are TEOL's illustrative calibrations, based on general market observation and TEOL's frameworks. They are not drawn from a single dataset and do not predict any specific outcome.