Surface strengths, fix risks, and present a credible technical foundation to maximise valuation
In competitive transactions, buyers move fast — and they look for daylight. Technical liabilities, unclear documentation, legacy systems, or process gaps can all slow a deal or reduce enterprise value.
Our Deal Readiness service gives sellers the clarity and structure needed to enter a transaction with confidence. We analyse your technical landscape, highlight value-adds, identify liabilities, and provide recommendations that strengthen your position before buyers begin their own due diligence. This enables cleaner conversations, fewer surprises, and an overall stronger negotiation stance.
Our Deal Readiness services
We help sellers surface strengths, fix risks, and present a clear, credible technical foundation that maximises valuation and smooths deal execution.
Technical landscape assessment
A deep review of your architecture, stack, integrations, engineering practices, security posture, data setup, and operational processes — identifying both strengths and areas that may raise concerns for buyers.
Value-add identification
Highlighting architectural advantages, scalability features, engineering maturity, innovation potential, and strengths within your product and processes that increase attractiveness to buyers.
Liability reduction plan
Identifying outdated tech, fragile components, security risks, gaps in documentation, or operational inefficiencies — and outlining a clear, realistic path to mitigate them pre-deal.
Team & process review
Assessing engineering capabilities, SDLC maturity, development processes, QA culture, DevOps practices, communication patterns, and knowledge-sharing to showcase organisational robustness.
Security, compliance & risk review
Evaluating cybersecurity posture, secrets management, access controls, encryption standards, regulatory compliance (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, etc.) and IP/licensing risks.
Data, product & strategy alignment
Reviewing data quality, governance, roadmap alignment, product direction, market fit, and innovation readiness through the lens of likely buyer concerns.
Deal Readiness capabilities
We help you enter the acquisition process fully prepared by identifying what you need to optimise across all areas of software development and SDLC.
Are you preparing for Technical Due Diligence ?
Get a clear, independent assessment of the technology you’re planning to sell — from architecture and engineering quality to security, data, and scalability risks. Our experts help you uncover liabilities and validate value before you commit.
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What our clients think
Our process
A typical collaboration takes 5 to 6 weeks from initiation to final presentation
Mergers and acquisitions insights
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FAQs: Deal readiness
When should we start Deal Readiness preparation?
The ideal window is 2–6 months before you begin buyer conversations or before you share any materials with potential acquirers or investors.
Deal preparation takes time because most issues worth fixing — outdated components, weak documentation, unclear architecture, fragile pipelines, process inconsistencies, or missing security controls — are not things you want to patch under pressure. Starting early gives you:
enough time to address meaningful technical gaps,
an opportunity to strengthen your value narrative,
the ability to enter due diligence without last-minute scrambling, and
a much smoother negotiation process because nothing comes as a surprise.
Teams that leave this too late often end up reacting instead of positioning themselves strategically. Early preparation reduces friction, builds credibility, and increases valuation potential.
How is Deal Readiness different from Technical Due Diligence?
Deal Readiness is a seller-side preparation phase. It’s about making sure you understand your technical landscape before a buyer reviews it.
Technical Due Diligence is a buyer-driven assessment, focused on evaluating the target objectively.
Here’s the simplest way to think about the difference:
Deal Readiness = “Let’s understand and improve our house before guests arrive.”
Technical Due Diligence = “Let’s inspect the house we’re thinking of buying.”
Deal Readiness identifies issues early, helps you fix or reframe them, and strengthens your technical story. During TDD, buyers dig deep into architecture, engineering health, security, team competence, data, product alignment, and operational risks.
If Deal Readiness is done properly, the TDD phase becomes far more predictable and less risky.
Does Deal Readiness include remediation?
Deal Readiness includes:
identifying weaknesses and liabilities,
recommending improvements,
prioritising what matters most for the transaction, and
providing a practical roadmap to address each issue.
Whether Zartis carries out the remediation work depends on your preference and timeline.
Some sellers want hands-on help modernising components, documenting systems, tightening security, improving pipelines, or strengthening DevOps. Others prefer to execute the improvements internally.
We can support either model. The key is that Deal Readiness sets the blueprint and priorities so you fix the right things — not everything.
Do you work with non-technical founders or mixed environments?
Yes. Many of the companies preparing for acquisition have strong business leadership but uneven technical maturity or incomplete documentation. This is extremely common.
We adapt the process to your environment by ensuring:
findings are explained in clear, business-friendly language,
recommendations focus on value, not jargon,
leadership gets an objective view of where the company stands, and
the narrative is tailored to what buyers will care about.
If you’re not a technical founder, Deal Readiness gives you the visibility and clarity needed to speak confidently about your platform and engineering organisation during buyer discussions.
Can you support the later phases (Technical Due Diligence & Post-Acquisition)?
Absolutely. Deal Readiness is one part of a full, end-to-end M&A technical support offering.
Many sellers extend the engagement to:
respond to the buyer’s detailed technical Q&A,
clarify findings from their TDD provider,
prepare documentation, diagrams, and explanations,
position strengths more clearly to influence negotiation, and
support post-acquisition integration planning once the deal closes.
Because we’ve already analysed your systems during Deal Readiness, we can accelerate later phases with minimal ramp-up — which is a major advantage once the transaction becomes time-sensitive.
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