Coordinating a Deal Team So the Founder Could Keep Running the Business

The situation

Navdeep was the chief executive of a technology company that built industrial monitoring software, and for over a year he had been watching a specialty manufacturer in Bracebridge with interest. The manufacturer made precision components that paired naturally with his company's sensor products, and its founder, Eitan, had built it over two decades into a business worth pursuing. When Eitan signaled he was open to a sale, Navdeep moved quickly, and by the time the two sides had exchanged a letter of intent, the deal was shaping up as a transaction in the range of $50 million to $80 million, funded through a mix of the acquirer's cash reserves and a credit facility arranged with its bank.

Navdeep brought in Simran, his company's vice president of corporate development, to run point on the deal day to day. Between them they had handled smaller acquisitions before, and their instinct was to keep as much of the work in-house as they could. That instinct held for about three weeks. Due diligence alone required coordinating an accounting firm reviewing the target's financial statements, a commercial real estate appraiser, an environmental consultant for the manufacturing site, and the acquirer's own bank, all while Navdeep was still expected to run his existing company and Simran was still expected to close the current quarter's product roadmap. Neither of them had built a career managing legal timelines, and the deal was starting to run them rather than the other way around.

What coordination was missing

The acquirer had signed an engagement letter with a law firm for the transaction, but that firm was billing by the hour and waiting to be told what to do next rather than driving the process. Requests to the target's advisors went out inconsistently. Diligence findings from the accountants and the environmental consultant sat in separate inboxes without anyone connecting them to what mattered for the purchase agreement. Simran was personally chasing signatures, scheduling calls across three advisor firms, and trying to translate technical findings into decisions Navdeep needed to make, on top of her actual job.

The gap became clear when the real estate appraisal came back. Eitan did not just run the manufacturing business — he personally owned the building it operated from, through a separate holding structure, and had been leasing it back to his own company at a rate that turned out to be well below the current market rent for comparable industrial space in the area. That arrangement had never been tested against a third-party tenant, because there had never been one. For the acquirer, it raised two connected problems: the historical financial statements understated what occupancy would actually cost going forward, and the business's continued use of the building after closing would depend on negotiating a fresh lease with Eitan personally, who would remain its landlord even after selling the operating company. Nobody on the deal had flagged that the real estate and the business needed to be treated as two separate negotiations running on two different tracks, and by the time it surfaced, the purchase price in the letter of intent had been built on numbers that no longer held together.

What we did

1. Took over as the single point of coordination for the deal team. Our team became the hub that every advisor reported into — the accountants, the environmental consultant, the appraiser, and the bank's counsel all sent findings to us, and we translated them into a running list of issues and decisions for Navdeep and Simran, rather than raw reports they had to interpret themselves.
2. Split the real property issue into its own negotiating track. We separated the lease negotiation with Eitan personally from the negotiation over the operating business with Eitan as seller, so the two conversations did not contaminate each other. This let the acquirer negotiate the business purchase price on the true operating numbers while addressing the below-market lease as a distinct, time-bound issue.
3. Built a weekly cadence that protected the client's time. Rather than ad hoc calls whenever an issue arose, we set a standing weekly meeting where open items were resolved in one sitting, with a written summary after each one. Navdeep attended only the calls where a decision genuinely required him; Simran no longer had to personally track down every advisor.
4. Renegotiated the purchase price against the corrected financials. Once the true cost of occupancy going forward was known, we worked with the accountants to restate what the business's earnings would look like at market rent, and used that to bring the purchase price down from the letter-of-intent figure to reflect the real economics of the business the acquirer was actually buying.
5. Negotiated a market-rate lease with a defined term and an option. We negotiated a new lease directly with Eitan as landlord, at market rent, with a term long enough to give the acquirer operational stability and an option to purchase the building later if it chose to. Eitan, in turn, retained a stream of rental income and did not have to sell an asset he still valued.
6. Managed the closing checklist so nothing fell through a gap between advisors. In the final weeks, we tracked every outstanding condition — financing sign-off, the environmental consultant's final letter, corporate approvals, the new lease's execution — against a single checklist, so responsibility for each item was clear and nothing was assumed to be someone else's job.

The outcome

The transaction closed a few months later than the original letter of intent had contemplated, and it closed on different terms than either side had first proposed. The purchase price for the operating business came down by an amount that reflected the corrected market rent, which Eitan accepted once the numbers were laid out plainly rather than negotiated on instinct. In exchange, the acquirer agreed to the longer lease term Eitan wanted, giving him certainty over his rental income for years rather than a shorter commitment he would have had to re-let on his own. Neither side got everything it had originally asked for, and that was the honest measure of success here: a deal that both sides could live with, reached without either walking away or grinding the relationship down to nothing.

For Navdeep and Simran, the more durable result was less visible on paper. Once the coordination role moved off their desks, Navdeep's company kept its product releases on schedule through the diligence period, and Simran was able to return her attention to the deal only when a real decision needed her judgment. The acquisition still took real work from both of them — no deal team removes that — but it stopped being a second full-time job layered on top of their actual ones. Eitan, for his part, kept a long-term tenant in a building he had built his business around, on terms that reflected what the space was actually worth, and stayed on for a transition period to help the new owners learn the operation.

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