Most deals that fail do not fail because the business is bad. They fail because it cannot be verified quickly enough, and the counterparty runs out of patience, budget, or belief before verification finishes.

Diligence is not a test of whether your company is good. It is a search for the distance between what you said and what can be shown. This workbook finds that distance while it is still cheap to close.

A working audit across the eight areas a serious investor or buyer will examine: the questions you will actually be asked, where companies your size commonly fall short, and 32 criteria scored against a deliberately harsh scale. You finish with a score out of 200, a band, and a gap register in the order things should be fixed — with owners, dates, and a definition of done.

Four sessions of about ninety minutes across two to three weeks. Not one afternoon. The gap between sessions is where people discover that the thing they confidently scored a 4 is a 1.

74 pages as two PDFs, one for screen and one for printing. Nine reusable blank worksheets, a ten-folder data room structure, two worked examples both invented and labelled as such, and a bonus plain-English glossary of 64 terms.

For companies raising roughly $1m to $25m, or preparing to sell, with revenue, customers, and some history to examine.

It will not value your company, predict an outcome, or make an unfundable business fundable. It is not advice, and it recommends no third-party tools.