Running a Commercial Due Diligence: Primary Research and Business Plan Validation

Kashish ran this commercial due diligence at EY-Parthenon across a two-to-three-week engagement. He owned the majority of the workstreams: storyboarding the output structure for each week, running primary research, and validating the target's five-year business plan.

Primary Research

He designed and conducted expert interviews with industry participants to gauge market sentiment: how buyers evaluate vendors, which selection criteria matter most, and where the market is heading. He also ran customer interviews with the target's own clients, probing their experience, satisfaction, and areas for improvement. These interviews served both as qualitative research and as a form of customer survey.

Alongside the interviews, he updated the team's proprietary models with the most recent available data on market demand and supply dynamics.

Business Plan Validation

The second major workstream was validating the target's five-year revenue and EBITDA forecast. Kashish approached this by decomposing the forecast into its smallest components: revenue broken into price and volume, each analyzed independently. For each component, he benchmarked the assumption against industry data, communicated with the client to understand the basis for specific numbers, and ran his own analysis to test whether the figures were achievable.

When the client shifted the scope or added new requests mid-engagement, he managed those conversations by first understanding the rationale, then presenting his own perspective, and agreeing on the most reasonable path forward. The engagement was delivered on time across both the primary research and the financial validation workstreams.