How Xcllusive Business Sales is moving upmarket with Due

Overview

Our client, Xcllusive Business Sales, is aiming to "move upmarket" and is targeting businesses of closer to $25 million which is a higher value than the typical target company of a business broker.

To achieve this objective, Xcllusive wanted to offer a professional data room to sellers to use when selling their business.

Xcllusive has used Due for 3 recent business sales in a variety of sectors and industries in its effort to sell businesses of higher valuations. During this time, Xcllusive has successfully onboarded its staff (operational and sales staff), its clients (the seller), the buyers and their respective advisors. Xcllusive is working toward using Due for all its business sales.

The Challenge

We mapped Xcllusive's current business sales process based on an initial consultation with the client. We identified that the process is comprised of 10 phases.

• Seller needs guidance on what information to provide to upload to the data room to provide to the buyer
• Seller is sharing information with the buyer and their advisors via email making it hard to track what document versions are shared
• Difficult to track information shared with interested buyers
• RFIs tracked across email and spreadsheets
• Free or low-cost solutions are not suitable for business sales but other solutions available are too expensive, particularly when there is no certainty the business will be sold
• Prolonged buyer Q&A delays the sale and costs everyone money

Our Approach

We recommended an approach that focused on how Xcllusive could use Due alongside their existing process to minimise operational disruptions of implementing a new system and reduce onboarding time.

• Secure, centralised workspace active from the beginning of the process
• The seller uses a checklist to confirm a complete data room
• Allow multiple buyer groups to be active simultaneously (in the case where there isn't 1 exclusive buyer or before an exclusive buyer is selected)
• All buyer Q&A in one place with audit trail. Allow broker to monitor the status of Q&A in the platform but with minimal input (so they can remain objective)
• Buyers can conduct legal due diligence using legally approved checklists
• Generate the index which is the definitive record of what was disclosed

The Results

Xcllusive and Due are measuring success against the metrics set out below.