Due Diligence: Target Due Diligence
THIS IS THE FREE, REDACTED VERSION OF THE TASKS IN THE M&A REFERENCE MODEL AND IT IS LICENSED UNDER Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International THE FULL SET OF DATA HAS TO BE LICENSED COMMERCIALLY. HERE is a full model example for one task. The task has the following goal(s):
Due Diligence results: prepared
The task has the following objectives:
Risk: minimized
Quality: maximized
Information asymmetry: minimized
Integration success: maximized
Short description of task Target Due Diligence:
The target is analyzed with regard to various topics. For example, strategic due diligence, GTM due diligence, technical due diligence, operations due diligence, cultural due diligence, intellectual property due diligence, and financial and tax due diligence.
The task uses the following business object types:
Target employees, Target locations, Target EbIT, Target coverage of supply chain, Target countries, Target company, Risk, Problem, Due Diligence results, Risk of the target
THIS IS THE FREE; REDACTED VERSION OF THE TASK IN THE M&A REFERENCE MODEL: THE FULL SET OF DATA HAS TO BE LICENSED(C) Dr. Karl Michael Popp 2026
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You can easily automate such tasks, have a look below:
Turn strategy due diligence into a repeatable, AI-assisted workflow
A production-grade Agent Skill (.md file) that guides an AI assistant — or your deal team — through a complete Due Diligence of a Target's Strategy, from data-room request to a board-ready recommendation. Built on Wiley M&A best practices and a fact-based product-perception method, and now shipping with a built-in 9-slide PowerPoint deck template.
What's inside
Structured workstream: strategic goals, assumptions, measures, KPIs, and execution feasibility
Buyer–target strategic fit assessment: complementarity, overlap, conflict, and synergy identification
Fact-based product-portfolio perception module — user-review data (G2, Capterra) analyzed with AI aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), benchmarked against competitors
10-section board-ready result template (executive summary → recommendation)
Full strategic risk register, synergy/dis-synergy assessment, and draft integration plan
NEW in v3.0: complete PPTX deck template — design system, slide-by-slide layout, and a fill-in data schema to generate an investment-committee deck in minutes
Who it's for
M&A advisors, corporate development teams, private-equity deal teams, and strategy consultants who want a consistent, defensible, AI-augmented approach to strategy DD.
Format & delivery
Instant digital download. One Markdown skill file, compatible with Perplexity, Claude, and other Agent-Skill-capable assistants. Includes the embedded PPTX template specification and two worked example structures (strong-fit and conditional-fit).
Author: Dr. Karl Popp · Version 3.0