Legal reads the documents. Quality of earnings reads the numbers. Commercial diligence reads the market. The person the whole thesis rests on rarely gets the same treatment. On your deal calendar. Fixed scope. Fixed fee.
You are deciding whether to commit. The question is the person the thesis rests on.
A company where the leader is the reason it works. A founder-led business where the founder is the plan. A control position where you inherit a management team rather than an asset.
The same method on a deal clock: fewer criteria, a tighter reference set, and findings sent as they land rather than in one package at the end. Built to finish inside an exclusivity window rather than to run past one. In a hold period, every month spent on the wrong leader comes out of the return.
The deal clock is assumed and carries no premium. We quote against your diligence calendar before we start, and hold it from that point.
Sent as they land, in the form your deal team already works in. Every finding shows how strong the evidence behind it is.
How many genuinely separate sources sit behind each finding, and what independent evidence the clock did not allow.
Material that belongs with your lawyers rather than in the data room. Kept complete, and never trimmed. A written concern can be discoverable if a deal is later challenged, so every document is written expecting to be read that way.
On a transaction between $50M and $250M, four workstreams read four different things.
Three of them are priced without argument. The fourth, frequently the one carrying the most risk in a founder-led business, is left to references the principal selected and a read taken across two meetings. The first three are specialist work and we would not pretend otherwise. We do the fourth.
One principal. Your deal clock. Findings, source map, counsel file.
The fee is built from named drivers rather than quoted from a range: the number of principals and your deal timeline. It is fixed in writing before any work begins. Ask and we will send you the build before you decide anything. Where privilege matters, we can be engaged through your deal counsel.
A second principal is a separate engagement with its own number, agreed before any work on them begins. What we will not do is revise a quoted fee upward in the middle of a running engagement. Expenses at cost.
Priced this way for a reason. Billing by the hour would give us a financial interest in how long the work runs, on a clock you do not control. We would rather share the interest you actually have: an answer that arrives before the window closes.
Reviewing several deals a year? Private equity firms and family offices can set up an annual arrangement that covers a set number of principal reads, agreed once and drawn on as deals come up.
We turn all three down, and we will say so on the first call rather than after a proposal.
Independence is either a set of commitments that cost something or a word on a website. These cost something, and they are in every engagement letter.
No investment position. Gannett.Partners holds no equity, debt, or economic interest in any company it evaluates, and takes none afterward. We decline LP allocations and co-investment in funds that are a plausible source of this work. Existing direct positions, companies we co-built, board seats, and every company held by the venture funds we are invested in sit on a standing exclusion list. The list is provided in writing at first contact, before scope.
No commercial conversation until delivery. Further work is not discussed, proposed, or priced with any party to the decision while diligence is running, including the firm that retained us. The order is the safeguard.
Continuing advisory sits with the client of record. Executive coaching for the leader you back, operating advisory, and rights and valuation work are the forms it takes. Where any of it follows the diligence, it is agreed after findings are delivered, with the party who retained us rather than with the person who was evaluated, and scoped and priced on its own.
Findings are not negotiable. How things are framed, ordered and emphasized is yours to direct. What the evidence says is not. Any request to change a finding is put in writing, and the full version is kept with your lawyers.
Structural facts are named. A loan to the company, a controlling stake, a board seat, or a separate negotiation with a principal is stated plainly wherever it affects the work. A fact found later looks like something hidden. The same fact stated up front is rigor.
We turn down three kinds of work. Search. Confirmation. And any engagement where the diligence cannot change the decision. The exclusions cost the firm work, which is the point.
All six commitments appear in every engagement letter. No fees are shared with counsel in either direction, and nothing of value is paid or accepted for a referral.
The Source Map counts how many genuinely separate sources sit behind your view of a founder or CEO. Seven questions, then a working map. Nothing you enter leaves your browser, and there is no signup.
Most buyers find that eleven accounts of a principal collapse into two or three genuinely separate sources. If that is what you find, the conversation is worth having.
