Sticky and stuck look the same in a contract schedule
A mid market private equity fund was buying a diagnostics company, and the price rested on the belief that laboratories never switch platforms. Retention built on a genuine cost of switching is worth paying for. Retention built on inertia, which a change in reimbursement or a competitor placement would move, is worth knowing about early. In a contract schedule the two look identical.
The fund could model the retention curve. What it could not see was what would hold that curve in place. Published analyst coverage of this part of the market was thin, and the investment committee date was already fixed. The people who decide whether a laboratory puts its contract back out to tender do not write any of this down.
We wrote the screening questions before any sourcing began
We wrote the screening questions before looking for anyone to answer them, so every candidate was tested against the same bar. Sourcing then ran across several seats rather than one: former laboratory directors, commercial leads at competitors, and procurement leads. We covered North America and Europe alongside India, Southeast Asia and the Gulf.
Expert calls opened the work for breadth. Where accounts differed on how costly switching really is, a multi expert panel put practitioners from different seats on the same question in one sitting. Part of the group was recruited for this question rather than drawn from a standing bench, which is how a thin market gets covered at all. Every expert cleared our compliance framework, and transcripts reached Nextyn IQ for the deal team to search.
The committee could see where every claim came from
The deal team went into the investment committee able to say who had said a thing, which seat that person sat in, and where the views diverged. Divergence between sources was surfaced rather than smoothed over, which is what gives a committee something it can interrogate.
The work reached the fund before the committee date, while the thesis could still change. The fund could defend both its conclusion and the sourcing behind it, and we owned the brief from scoping through to delivery.
