Illustrative excerpt — Pre-Signing Tech Review
See the structure of a decision-oriented deliverable
Illustrative example for a European B2B SaaS. All data, dates, names and amounts are fictional or modified. This document is non-contractual.
- Target
- European B2B SaaS — modified data
- Transaction
- Primary LBO — modified data
- Scope
- Architecture, delivery, security, team, cloud and IP
- Illustrative duration
- 10 business days, the length of the offer
- Recipient
- Operating Partner / Investment Committee
1. Executive conclusion
Illustrative recommendation
Proceed under conditions, with three risks contractually secured before signing.
Do not value the platform as “cloud-native scalable” without qualification. Include a technical security plan and a transformation envelope in the first 100 days.
Risk summary
| Niveau | Nombre | Lecture Comité |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | 1 | May change the decision or deal conditions |
| High | 3 | Must be addressed in the SPA or 100-day plan |
| Moderate | 4 | To be included in the post-closing action plan |
| Low | 2 | Monitoring recommended |
2. Red Flag examples
RF-01 — Dependency on two historical profiles
- Domain
- Team / Key Man Risk
- Severity
- Critical
- Signal
- Two people hold most of the knowledge of the billing engine and production deployment.
- Evidence observed
- Partial documentation, irregular code reviews, contradictory interviews about the release process.
- Deal impact
- Risk to continuity of value and the recruitment plan.
- Recommendation
- Retention arrangement, priority documentation and knowledge transfer within 30 days.
- Post-closing owner
- Target CTO / Operating Partner
RF-02 — Billing engine not decoupled
- Domain
- Architecture / Scalability
- Severity
- High
- Signal
- The billing engine and the reporting module share a single database; month-end closings degrade production.
- Evidence observed
- No repeatable load test, degraded response times at month end, database schema shared across three applications.
- Deal impact
- The growth plan (invoice volume doubling) is not sustainable without a partial rebuild.
- Recommendation
- Decouple the billing engine in two stages; set aside an envelope in the 100-day plan.
- Confidence level
- Medium: to be confirmed by a load test.
From finding to figure: an example of financial translation for RF-02
Every figure rests on a written assumption that the committee can challenge.
| Assumption 1 | Team dedicated to decoupling | 6 FTE |
|---|---|---|
| Assumption 2 | Duration | 9 months |
| Assumption 3 | Average loaded cost | €8k per FTE per month |
| Central estimate | 6 × 9 × €8k | ≈ €0.43M |
| Uncertainty applied | ± 30% | €0.3M to €0.6M |
| Proposed treatment | To be provisioned outside the business plan and factored into the price or the 100-day plan | Decoupling envelope |
All values in this example are fictitious and illustrate the method; they describe no real engagement.
Decision table
| Sujet | Situation | Cible | Décision |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Dependency on one person | Documented and shared process | Priority 1 |
| Scalability | Incomplete peak-load tests | Repeatable load test | Budget to confirm |
| Security | Controls not centralised | Risk register and remediation | Priority 2 |
| Cloud | Costs rising without FinOps | Budgets, tags and alerts | Priority 3 |
3. 100-day plan
- Day 0–10
Secure key people and access
- Day 10–30
Document critical flows and stabilise production
- Day 30–60
Test scalability and quantify technical debt
- Day 60–100
Arbitrate target path, budget and CTO recruitment
4. Scope and limitations
Included: architecture, delivery, documentary security, people dependency, cloud costs, intellectual property (technical review: licences, dependencies, code) and integration capacity. No legal audit.
Not included: penetration testing, financial audit, legal opinion, certification, future performance guarantee or exhaustive code validation.