Private equity diligence may actually work better if it was in a roast format.
Not the polite version we use now.
Not the beautifully formatted diligence report where every sentence has been washed through legal, the bank, management, three consultants and some heroic VP who thinks “further analysis required” is a personality.
I mean an actual roast.
A room full of people forced to say what everyone is privately thinking.
“Your TAM slide looks like it was built by a banker who confused ambition with arithmetic.”
“Your CFO is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Lots of structure, absolutely no protection, and somehow everyone is still drowning.”
“Your customer concentration is not a risk. It is a hostage situation with invoices.”
“Your sales team is one founder, two passengers, and a CRM that looks like it was last updated on a BlackBerry.”
“Your adjusted EBITDA has been adjusted so many times it now qualifies as a missing person.”
“Your revenue bridge has more holes than a Florida sinkhole.”
“Your AI strategy is one ChatGPT login, a McKinsey article, and a head of ops who says ‘agentic’ because he heard it at a conference.”
“Your tech stack is nine SaaS tools, three spreadsheets, and a controller called Denise who is now the single point of failure for Western civilization.”
“Your pipeline is not weighted. It is fictional.”
“Your retention analysis excludes churned customers, which is bold in the same way driving blindfolded on I-95 is bold.”
“Your gross margin improvement plan is just vendor abuse with a logo on it.”
“Your management team has depth in the same way a kiddie pool has depth.”
“Your founder transition plan is adorable. He is still approving printer paper and emotionally attached to the Google Ads account.”
“Your organic growth story is paid search wearing a fake mustache.”
“Your board pack has 84 slides and somehow says nothing, which is impressive in a white-collar crime sort of way.”
This is what diligence should do.
Take the polite language out of the room.
A broken tech stack becomes broken.
No attribution becomes no idea what is working.
A sales leader with no pipeline discipline becomes a very expensive motivational speaker.
A business held together by founder magic, Excel and fear becomes a business held together by founder magic, Excel and fear.
Everyone knows this already.
They just call it “value creation opportunity” because that sounds better in an IC memo.
Most bad deals do not fail because nobody saw the issue.
They fail because everyone saw it, softened the wording, buried it on page 74, and decided reality could be handled post-close.
Private equity does not need more diligence.
It needs fewer euphemisms and more people willing to say the business looks like a dumpster fire with recurring revenue.
