Before you sign the investment case, test every ecommerce assumption in it
Financial diligence confirms the online revenue happened. Commercial diligence sizes the market. Technology diligence inventories the platform. None of them tests whether a customer arriving at the business today can find, trust and buy at the rate the model assumes for the next five years. The financial workstream cannot say whether the revenue happened because the proposition is winning or because paid media was bought at a cost the next owner inherits. The commercial workstream rarely walks the checkout. The growth line itself is asserted by management, extrapolated by the model, and tested by nobody who has run one.
This instrument sits alongside the other workstreams and answers the one question they were not built to ask: whether the ecommerce proposition and the operating model behind it can deliver the revenue and margin the case assumes.
What the read covers
The full Review, plus the supporting data across ecommerce, marketing, social, marketplaces, retail and the P&L, with two or three named competitors read alongside. Every assumption in the case marked Confirmed, At Risk or Unsupported. The output is not a score. It is the single binding constraint on the plan, the evidence behind it with every claim labelled, what confirmatory diligence must still prove, and the hundred-day plan: what is done first, what is deliberately not done, who owns each line, and what the house sees at day one hundred.
The consequence of not testing it
If the assumption is wrong, the house does not have a digital problem. It has an entry valuation built on a number that will not arrive, a value-creation plan whose first lever does not move, a covenant case that assumed the growth, and an exit story a buyer’s diligence will take apart in the second week. Every one of those is more expensive than the read that would have caught it. Three to four weeks.
What the house gets, and what it does not
Fixed fee, stated in writing before instruction; scope adjusts to the target and the access available, the price does not adjust to the deal, the timetable or the answer. No execution: Barking Cat does not implement, build, deliver, select vendors on commission or place people, and is never in a delivery partner’s payment chain. No contingent reward: no success fee, no fee linked to valuation or exit, no equity, no carry, no referral arrangement in either direction. One side of a deal, conflicts checked before instruction. Disclosure register shared with every engagement. Reports addressed to the instructing house, the party entitled to rely on them. Nothing about a target, a holding or a house appears in published work without per-instance written agreement.
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