Data Readiness Assessment
Find out where your data is costing you value before a buyer, a board, or an AI project finds it for you. Four to six weeks, on site, fixed fee.
What it is
On-site discovery of how data actually moves through your business, where it breaks, and who it depends on. Not an audit of your technology stack. An assessment of whether the numbers your board, your buyers, and your operating plan rely on can actually be defended.
You leave with a scored baseline, the constraints ranked by commercial damage, and a costed, sequenced plan to fix them. The assessment identifies the two or three constraints doing the most damage. It does not hand you a forty-item backlog.
What you get
- A scored data readiness baseline. Where you stand across the dimensions buyers and boards actually test.
- Constraints ranked by commercial damage. Not by technical severity. By what each one is costing you.
- A costed, sequenced remediation plan. What to fix, in what order, for what money, over what timeline.
- A defensibility read on the numbers that matter. Whether revenue, margin, and customer metrics can be reproduced from source.
- Ownership and operating model recommendations. Who has to own what for the fix to hold after we leave.
Who this is for
PE-backed companies and the operating partners who sit above them. It is the right engagement if any of these are true.
- Finance, sales, and operations report different numbers for the same metric.
- Nobody can reproduce last quarter's revenue from source systems quickly.
- An exit is twelve to eighteen months out and the data cannot support the story.
- An AI initiative has stalled and the root cause looks like the data underneath it.
- Two companies merged and "active customer" still means two different things.
Timing
Twelve months before an exit is ideal. Six months is tight but workable. Three months is emergency triage. The earlier you start, the more you can fix and the less it looks like you are cleaning up for a sale. Buyers can tell the difference between genuine operational improvement and last-minute window dressing.
If you are three to five years from a sale, it is not too early. The work that makes data defensible for exit is the same work that makes it useful for operating decisions now.
Scope, timeline and fee
Every engagement has a defined scope, timeline, and deliverable. No open-ended retainers.
What happens after
Phase 2, Implementation, 60 to 90 days. We deliver the Phase 1 plan. Not just pipelines and reporting, but the operating model and ownership that keep the fix in place. Fortune 100 engineering at mid-market speed.
Phase 3, Sustain. Monitoring, optimisation, and knowledge transfer. The capability and the people to run it stay after we leave.
How this fits with your existing advisors
We complement them. Your banker tells the equity story. Your accountant runs quality of earnings. We make sure the data underneath both of those survives scrutiny. We have worked alongside investment banks, QoE providers, and legal teams, and our deliverables are built to support theirs rather than compete with them.
The same applies to your internal team. Your people know the business. We know what PE firms and buyers look for. The gap is rarely technical skill. It is knowing which data points matter most and what defensible looks like when the pressure is on. We work alongside your team, not instead of them.
Find out where your data is holding you back.
Start with the free VCP Data Score to see where you stand in a few minutes, or book a short call and we will tell you straight whether this is the right engagement for you.