The Template Was Built to Win
The pre-sales engineer finished the proposal at 12:40am. Every number followed from the template. The template followed from the wins. Twelve months later, a PE fund used the same model — same benchmarks, same structural gaps — to price a distribution business whose owner had no idea the field that would have changed everything didn't exist in the template. This is what that costs you, and what you can do before the offer arrives.
The $840,000 Nobody Modeled
The acquisition inquiry arrived on a Tuesday. Four sentences. An EBITDA multiple. A 30-day window. What the email did not mention is that the fund's model has already assigned a projection to your workforce, built from industry benchmarks, not from a conversation with anyone on your floor. The gap between what that model assumes and what your workforce actually knows has a documented median. It is $840,000. It was not in any vendor proposal across twelve deployments. It was not in any acquisition model on either side of any of those transactions. The seller who documents it first is having a different conversation.