The CDD Toolkit + Voice-of-Customer

Learning objectives

By the end you can:

1. State what a Commercial Due Diligence is and is not (distinguishing it from financial, tax, and legal due diligence) and identify who commissions one (a PE sponsor pre-investment, a corporate acquirer pre-deal, a lender pre-financing) and why the timeline is always short and the stakes always large.
2. Convert a vague investment thesis ("we like this space") into a small set of falsifiable hypotheses, each carrying an explicit kill criterion, the specific finding that would make you recommend walking away.
3. Build a MECE CDD issue tree and workplan across the five standard lenses (market, competitive position, customer, financial quality, and execution/organizational risk) and map every hypothesis to the lens(es) that will test it.
4. Design a Voice-of-Customer and expert-call research program: build a sampling frame across genuinely different segments, write a discussion guide free of leading questions, and name the standing biases (selection, sponsor, small-*n*, social-desirability) that quietly corrupt primary research if left unchecked.
5. Build a top-down and a bottom-up market model and reconcile them, treating the gap between the two approaches, not just their average, as a source of insight.
6. Run a competitive teardown that isolates the actual mechanism of advantage (or its absence) rather than a feature checklist, and connect it explicitly to a moat check.
7. Read a target's financial quality commercially (revenue quality, customer concentration, cohort/retention behavior, a same-store growth bridge) without re-performing financial due diligence.
8. Synthesize every lens's evidence into a weighted go/no-go, build a risk register with a named mitigation for every material risk, and apply the veto rule that a killed hypothesis overrides any composite score.
9. Hand the verdict off as an answer-first CDD memo (governing thought → key line → support), and know precisely which part of that hand-off belongs to this galaxy and which belongs to deck craft.
10. (Productivity objective: R10.) Use AI to accelerate VoC-transcript synthesis, market-sizing desk research, competitor benchmarking, and risk-register/memo drafting, while keeping every figure, quote, and risk traced to evidence you generated or verified yourself.

Prerequisites & connections

Builds on. CN5.01 (Business-Model Teardown & Unit Economics. Advisory Lens) supplies the contribution/CAC-LTV/cohort vocabulary this module's financial-quality lens leans on directly; CN5.02 (Market Attractiveness & Competitive Dynamics) supplies the market-structure and profit-pool judgment the market model and teardown apply here. From further back: CN1.01 (Issue Trees & MECE) is the tree-building discipline behind every CDD workplan; CN1.02 (Hypothesis-Driven Problem Solving) is exactly the machinery this module points at an investment thesis; CN2.02 (Market Sizing & Guesstimates) is where the top-down/bottom-up mechanics were first taught, this module applies them to a live deal, it does not re-derive them; CN3.01 (Competitive & Industry Frameworks) supplies Five Forces, 3C, and the value chain for the teardown; CN3.03 (the meta-skill: when frameworks mislead) is the standing warning against mistaking scale for a moat that this module's density example makes concrete with real arithmetic.

Feeds forward. A "go" verdict here is the direct input to CN6.01/CN6.02, the deal-rationale, synergy-build, portfolio, and PMI work that only starts once commercial diligence has cleared; the risk register this module's final stage produces is the seed of the 100-day risk log that CN7.01/CN7.02 formalize during implementation. The answer-first memo this module produces hands off to CN1.03 (The "So What": Synthesis & Answer-First Storyline) and, outside this galaxy, to M10.03 ("The Communication Toolkit: Making the Analysis Change a Decision," the Minto Pyramid in full) and eventually to the Presentation galaxy for deck craft proper, this module teaches only the consulting-specific answer-first logic of the verdict; it never teaches storylining or slide design, and does not re-teach Minto's mechanics.

In the Finance galaxy: M4.01 (Business Model Anatomy) and M4.02 (Unit Economics) are the mechanics this module's financial-quality lens applies without re-teaching; M4.03 (Industry Structure: Porter & Value Chains), M4.04 (Moats I: The Five Sources & the Numbers Test), and M4.05 (Moats II: Greenwald, 7 Powers & Measuring the Moat) are the frameworks the competitive teardown leans on, go there for the underlying mechanics, come here for the advisory application. M3.09 (Modeling II: DCF, Comps, LBO & M&A Basics), M3.10 (Special Situations + Phase Capstone), and E11.02 (M&A, Deals & Special Situations Lab) are where the deal math that follows a "go" actually lives, this module owns the advisory-seat judgment of whether and why, the modeling galaxy owns the spreadsheet. M5.01–M5.10, the seventeen sector playbooks, are where you go for KPI-level industry depth once you know which sector you are diligencing, this module teaches the generic CDD method that decides which playbook to open. And if this is your first CDD, welcome back: E11.03 (The Consulting Case-Interview Lab) and its case CL-11.3 ("Kite Foods Profitability") were the branch's Cycle-2 taster; this cluster is the deep treatment the taster exists to on-ramp into.