Different Buyer
Customer Analysis — Acquisition Due Diligence
Management presentations tell you what the brand wants to be true. Transaction data tells you what the customer base actually looks like.
Pre-acquisition due diligence on a consumer brand requires understanding customer concentration, retention, lifetime value, and post-close risk. Most deal teams get a management deck with topline revenue, gross margins, and a hockey-stick projection. What they don’t get is a view of the customer base built from the transactions themselves — who actually buys, how often they come back, what they’re worth over time, and where the concentration risk sits.
That gap matters because the customer base is the asset. Revenue is a trailing indicator of customer behavior. A brand with $10M in revenue and three customers who each represent 30% of it is a fundamentally different acquisition than one with the same revenue spread across 4,000 accounts with steady cohort retention. The management deck won’t show you the difference. The transaction data will.
The worked example
A 22-chapter analysis of the UCI Online Retail Dataset, reframed as commercial due diligence for a UK wholesale gift retailer. Three buyer segments, five parts: Customer Base Assessment, Retention & Growth Analysis, Customer Lifetime Value Modeling, Risk Assessment, and a Post-Close Action Plan.
The analysis identifies concentration risk (top-10 customers generating a disproportionate share of revenue), maps cohort retention curves to distinguish real growth from churn replacement, builds CLV models that separate high-value repeat buyers from one-time purchasers, and flags the specific post-close risks that would survive into the new owner’s P&L.
What you get
A pre-evaluation report built from transaction data — not management presentations. Customer concentration analysis, cohort retention curves, CLV modeling, risk flags, and a post-close action plan. Scoped for PE firms, family offices, or strategic acquirers evaluating a consumer brand.
The deliverable is a standalone document your deal team can work from: quantified findings, identified risks, and specific actions ranked by impact. Fixed fee, defined timeline.
Evaluating a consumer brand?
Tell me about the target and what transaction data is available. I’ll tell you what a customer-base analysis can show you before the LOI and what it costs. Thirty minutes, no obligation.