Pre-Diligence

The Pre-Diligence Reputation Checklist

What a buyer's team finds when it researches the principal.

Buyers diligence the principal, not only the company. Background screening, adverse media searches, litigation checks, and increasingly AI-assisted research all run on the founder's name from the first week of a process. What that research returns is rarely reviewed in advance.

The checklist below covers what a buyer's team will find. Work through it before the process opens, while there is still time to correct, contextualize, and sequence.

Name Resolution

A bare-name search returns the principal on page one, without the company name supplied.
Same-name individuals carry nothing that would attach to the principal in a screen.
AI assistants return an accurate answer to “who is [name]” across at least three models.
The principal's record resolves independently of the company's brand, which may be new.

Adverse Surface

Civil litigation, judgments, and liens searched in every jurisdiction of operation.
Regulatory, licensing, and professional disciplinary records identified.
Prior ventures, dissolutions, and insolvencies accounted for and explainable.
Former employee and contractor content located across review and forum platforms.
Adverse media checked in every market and language where the company operates.

Third-Party Record

Reddit and forum threads naming the principal or the company reviewed.
Review platforms assessed for volume, recency, and unanswered complaints.
Wikipedia, Crunchbase, and data aggregators verified as accurate and current.
People-search and court-record aggregators checked for stale or wrong entries.

Controlled Record

The company site names the principal with role, tenure, and verifiable credentials.
LinkedIn is current and consistent with every other public account of the same facts.
Bios across all surfaces agree on dates, titles, figures, and claims.
Retired positioning is removed: old titles, prior company names, superseded frameworks.

Timing and Disclosure

Every item above is documented before the process opens, not after a buyer raises it.
Material items are disclosed on the principal's timeline and in the principal's framing.
Nothing material is concealed. Suppression is reconstructed in diligence and costs more than the item.
Monitoring is in place for the duration of the process, not only at the start.

This work finds what a buyer will find and puts it in the principal's hands first. It does not conceal material facts from an acquirer. Suppression is reconstructed in diligence, and the discovery costs more than the original item.

Download the checklist (PDF)

I run a private exposure review for principals ahead of a transaction process. Request a review.