Founders preparing for a sale or an M&A process often need sale readiness work done well before a banker is engaged. Traverse scopes this as a project CFO engagement — a defined deliverable, owned end to end, handed off complete.
A founder-owned business wanted to go to market within six months — but its financials weren't ready for buyer scrutiny. A Traverse project CFO rebuilt the numbers and ran sale readiness end to end.
Founders preparing for a sale or an M&A process often need sale readiness work done well before a banker is engaged. Traverse scopes this as a project CFO engagement — a defined deliverable, owned end to end, handed off complete.
The founder had built a genuinely valuable business over fifteen years, but had never run a sale process. The financials reflected years of pragmatic, founder-led decision-making — not the standard a sophisticated buyer would expect.
Two related entities shared a bank account and a bookkeeper, revenue recognition varied by service line, and there was no clean, standalone P&L a buyer's diligence team could underwrite without extensive rework.
The founder knew which expenses were personal or one-time, but none of it was documented. Without support for EBITDA addbacks, buyers would discount the earnings picture rather than take the founder's word for it.
This was the founder's first sale process. There was no data room structure, no management presentation, and no experience anticipating what buyers would ask for or when.
Traverse scoped a project CFO engagement against a defined deliverable and a six-month timeline: a market-ready data room, a defensible quality-of-earnings position, and a founder who could walk into buyer meetings prepared rather than exposed.
Quality of earnings (QoE) tests whether reported EBITDA reflects a company's true, sustainable earning power — adjusting for one-time items, personal expenses, and non-recurring revenue. Buyers run their own QoE review during diligence; a seller who arrives with a defensible QoE position and every addback documented tends to see fewer valuation surprises and a faster path to close.
A business that wasn't ready for a single buyer conversation went to market with a credible earnings story and closed a signed letter of intent ahead of schedule.
From engagement start to a fully organized, market-ready data room.
Average response time on buyer diligence requests during the process.
Signed letter of intent, ahead of the founder's original timeline.
Buyer diligence calls handled by the project CFO, not the founder.
I'd never sold a company before. Our project CFO had done it a dozen times, and that experience showed up in every buyer conversation — from the first data room request to the final call before the LOI.
Quality of earnings (QoE) is an analysis that tests whether a company's reported EBITDA reflects its true, sustainable earning power — adjusting for one-time items, personal expenses run through the business, non-recurring revenue, and accounting policy choices. Buyers commission their own QoE review during diligence; sellers who prepare a defensible QoE position in advance, with every addback documented and supportable, tend to see fewer valuation surprises and a faster path to close.
An M&A data room organizes the financial, legal, operational, and commercial documents a buyer needs to complete diligence — historical financials, a quality-of-earnings schedule, contracts, cap table, org chart, customer concentration data, and a management presentation, among others. A well-structured data room, built before a process starts rather than assembled reactively, signals seller readiness and materially shortens the diligence timeline.
This case study is an anonymized composite drawn from representative Traverse engagements. Client identity, exact figures, and identifying details have been adjusted to protect confidentiality.
Traverse project CFOs prepare founders and owners for a cleaner, higher-value transaction — before an investment banker ever enters the picture.
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