What operational due diligence covers
- True capacity and throughput vs. what the CIM claims
- Reliability and unplanned downtime as a throughput and capex risk
- Quality exposure — complaint, hold, and scrap trends and the process causes behind them
- Organizational strength — is the team capable of delivering the plan?
- Capital needs the seller may have deferred
Red flags before close
A plant running hot on paper but reactive on the floor, deferred maintenance disguised as EBITDA, or a key-person dependency in operations — these are the findings that change a price or a plan. Better to know before signing.
The 100-day plan
Value creation starts at close. A focused 100-day plan sequences the highest-leverage moves — usually reliability and throughput first, because they convert fastest to margin — with owners, metrics, and a cadence that ties operational progress to EBITDA.
Value levers over the hold
- Reliability: recover the largest single category of OEE loss
- Throughput: debottleneck and raise OEE toward real capacity
- Quality: reduce the downside risk that can impair a business overnight
Exit readiness
The same disciplines that create value make a business more sellable: documented systems, a capable team, and reliable, predictable output. A buyer pays more for a plant that runs on systems than one that runs on heroes.
In one protein-plant turnaround, this is exactly how it played out. A PE-owned plant with ten straight years of losses, headed for piecemeal liquidation, was rebuilt into a performing asset and sold to a new owner. Batch failures fell 96%, waste 59%, and throughput rose 50% — with the waste and off-spec reductions alone worth roughly $1.74M a year. The improvements didn't just help the sale; they made it possible. See the full case study.