Pricing Value Diligence
Know what the pricing is worth before you invest. Takuven quantifies the profit a target leaks today, the pricing upside available tomorrow, and the pricing power that decides how defensible its earnings are.
Three answers before you commit
Financial diligence audits the numbers as they are. Commercial diligence sizes the market. Pricing Value Diligence answers what both leave open: what the target’s pricing is worth, and whether it will hold. It is a Takuven product: one method, three numbers, delivered inside your deal clock.
The Leak
The profit the target loses today: discounts nobody approved, rebates without conditions, payment terms and freight nobody prices, price lists nobody enforces. The leak suppresses reported EBITDA. Found before you sign, it is immediate recovery potential you are not paying for. Found before you sell, it is EBITDA you can still capture.
The Upside
The additional EBITDA that better pricing could create: sharper segmentation, cleaner price architecture, offers packaged and priced to the value they deliver. The upside is the value-creation plan, priced before you own the company.
The Power
How defensible the prices behind the earnings are. We read the seven signals that decide it: the equity of the brand, how concentrated the customers are, how crowded the competitive field is, how painful switching would be, the value customers receive for what they pay, whether the sector’s capacity is tight or in excess, and what happened the last times prices moved. Weak pricing power raises earnings risk, and earnings risk belongs in the price you pay.
The Takuven method
The three answers come from one proprietary diagnostic: the Defensible EBITDA Bridge. One page takes the target from the EBITDA it reports to the EBITDA it could defend, with every step quantified and evidenced: the leak recovered, the upside priced, the power tested against the seven signals above. Behind it, twenty-five years of pricing practice encoded into Takuven’s AI-assisted diagnostic: the same engine that runs our operator work, pointed at your target. How we score it stays in the room.
What it reads
The diagnostic adapts to the access you have.
Selling, or in the portfolio
Full transaction data, invoice by invoice. The deepest read.
Buying, in confirmatory diligence
Five standard extracts added to your existing request list: sales by customer, product and month, and the discount, rebate and terms schedules. Takuven brings the request list; every seller can produce these.
Screening, before inside access
The pricing power read works outside-in, from prices, market structure and customer evidence, and the leak is stated as a range, not a number.
The Leak needs numbers. The Power can be read from outside.
What you receive
A concise, committee-ready report: the Defensible EBITDA Bridge, the pricing power read with the evidence behind it, and what both mean for your valuation and your first hundred days. Delivered in weeks, not months, inside the deal clock, under NDA.
When investors use it
Entry
Before you sign: know what you are buying, and what it is really worth.
Hold
In the first hundred days: the findings become the recovery plan, with owners and dates.
Exit
Twelve to eighteen months before a sale: capture the leak so it sits in the numbers the buyer pays for.
For venture and growth investors, the pricing power read stands on its own: it tells you whether the company you are backing can monetize what it builds. We do not promise leak recovery on a company that has little transaction history yet.
If you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.
Warren Buffett, 2010 interview with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
Same engine, different seat
Operators run Profit Recovery to capture margin in the company they lead. Investors run Pricing Value Diligence to know what a company is worth before buying it, and to bank the margin before selling it. See Profit Recovery →
Bring one live target
Bring one live target to a 45-minute conversation. You leave with the scope: what we would measure, which extracts it takes, and when you would have the three answers.