Private equityCommercial diligence, live deal
How a diligence team found four operators who had run the exact playbook
Not category-adjacent experts — people who had personally managed the same co-packer transition.
Names, companies, sectors and figures are anonymised. This study describes the workflow and the persona rather than the customer.
01Situation
Three weeks to underwrite a DTC beverage business whose model rested on a move between co-packers that had not happened yet. The question the model turned on was how long that transition really takes and what breaks during it.
The expert networks the fund already pays for returned people who had run adjacent categories at adjacent scale, at a rate that made a wrong match expensive twice. What was needed was narrower than a category: someone who had personally sat through the same transition.
02Search
Find operators who have run supply chain or operations at a DTC beverage brand and personally managed a move between co-packers, in the last five years.
Must have
- A hands-on operator, not a consultant who advised on one
- DTC beverage specifically, not food and beverage broadly
- The co-packer transition itself, named
Ruled out
- Current employees of the target or its direct competitors
- Anyone likely to be under NDA with the target
- Advisory firms and fractional operators
Intended actionA paid call within the week, scheduled and expensed without a network in the middle.
03Evidence
Why they fit
- The transition appears in the person's own account of the role, with a timeframe — not inferred from a job title.
- Tenure covers the period of the move, so the person was there for it rather than arriving after.
- Two had done it twice, which is the difference between an anecdote and a pattern.
Verified
- Employer and dates, against the company's record
- Seniority sufficient to have owned the decision
Still uncertain
- How much of the transition each person personally owned versus their team — asked directly on the call rather than assumed from the title.
- Whether an existing NDA permitted the discussion. Two of the six approached declined on exactly that basis.
- Whether the target's specific co-packer relationship resembles the ones they managed.
04Action
- Six approached, four booked, staggered across three days so the earlier calls could sharpen the later questions.
- Two declined citing a conflict, which the team recorded as a signal about the category rather than a failed outreach.
- Each call was scheduled and paid directly, with the conflict check written into the first message rather than left to a network.
05Outcome
Four calls inside eight days, at a fraction of the per-hour rate the fund pays its networks. One call changed a working assumption in the model — the transition timeline the team had underwritten was materially optimistic.
- Operators approached
- 6
- Calls completed
- 4
- On existing networks
- 0
Elapsed8 days from prompt to the fourth call
Net newNone of the four appeared on either of the two expert networks the fund already subscribes to.