The Organisation
A mid-market private equity investor based in Australia was acquiring a $180 million revenue consumer goods business operating across three states.
The company employed 230 staff, including a 35-person technology team. Annual technology spend was approximately $3.2 million, supporting warehousing, logistics, online sales, and integrations with major retail partners.
Technology was not peripheral to the investment thesis. It was central to it.
The deal timeline was tight. Competitive tension was building, and the investor had an eight-week window to complete diligence and move to binding terms.
The Challenge
The investor's usual approach was to engage Deloitte to conduct full technology due diligence. They trusted Deloitte and had worked with them before. The issue was not quality. It was sequencing.
A traditional diligence process would likely involve three to four weeks of discovery before meaningful risk analysis began - mapping infrastructure, documenting system integrations, reviewing vendor contracts. Necessary work. But expensive and time-consuming.
In a competitive process, waiting several weeks before gaining meaningful visibility was not ideal. The investor did not want to replace their advisors. They wanted to arrive at the deeper analysis phase faster, with a structured baseline already in place.
The Approach
StackUp was deployed at the beginning of the diligence process.
The leadership team completed a structured assessment in under 30 minutes. Within 24 hours, the investor had a documented, independent baseline of the company's technology function.
The output provided:
- A mapped overview of infrastructure, applications and integrations
- Visibility into security controls and testing history
- Identification of governance gaps
- A maturity benchmark across key operational domains
The assessment surfaced several areas worth closer attention, including:
- Disaster recovery processes that had not been fully tested in the past 18 months
- Undocumented third-party integrations supporting key retail relationships
- Vendor concentration risk within core infrastructure services
- A technology roadmap that was largely operational rather than strategically documented
None of these issues were catastrophic but they were material. And they were now visible early in the process.
"We didn't want to replace our advisors. We just didn't want to spend three weeks figuring out what existed before we could talk about what actually mattered."
The Outcome
The initial discovery phase was effectively compressed from an expected three to four weeks to 48 hours.
When the Deloitte team were formally engaged, they were able to focus immediately on validating the identified risk areas and conducting deeper architectural and security analysis, rather than spending weeks on foundational mapping.
This sequencing reduced early advisory effort and ensured expert time was directed toward high-value judgment calls.
The investment committee received documented findings early enough to influence negotiation strategy and risk pricing, rather than after commercial terms had largely been agreed.
The deal proceeded at market pace. Governance requirements were satisfied.
Technology risk was assessed before it became a post-acquisition surprise. And the early findings allowed the investor to adjust risk assumptions and incorporate remediation costs into valuation discussions before signing.