Ten questions that measure where an acquisition is carrying risk, from synergy confidence to diligence completeness, while the terms can still reflect the answers.
Score the deal currently on the table, at its current stage, with its current terms. The questions and point values are fixed, nothing you answer is stored, and the same answers always return the same risk profile.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
Operators who have led acquisitions, and lived with the integrations that followed, sit on the Global Board. A confidential client brief puts this deal in front of them before signature.
Review this before committingAnswer for this deal as it stands today, not as the deal team expects it to look at signing.
On these answers the deal logic is specific, the integration burden is contained and diligence has done its work. That combination lowers the odds of the classic failure modes, though acquirers do tend to score their own deals generously.
The deal carries concentrated risk in identifiable areas rather than general fragility. Deals in this band complete successfully and then underperform, because the risks visible at signing were priced as manageable and never actively managed.
This profile combines several of the factors that most reliably destroy deal value: a shifting rationale, deep integration, contested alignment, or diligence compressed to protect the timetable. At this level the burden of proof should sit with proceeding, not with hesitating.
Acquisitions generate their own momentum: advisers are paid on completion, executives have announced intent, and the deal team has spent months learning to want the target. In that environment, risks are not concealed so much as reclassified: attrition becomes a synergy opportunity, cultural distance becomes complementary strengths. A fixed scorecard is useful precisely because it does not attend the deal meetings.
Run it first before exclusivity, when walking away is still cheap, and again before the final board approval, when diligence has replaced assumptions with findings. The movement between the two scores tells its own story: risk that grows as you learn more about the target is the market's way of revising the price, whether or not the deal model agrees.
Each answer contributes 0, 5 or 10 points to a total normalised to 100, where higher means more embedded risk. Three bands map the result. The scale is deliberately blunt: it cannot weigh one risk against another, but it reliably shows whether risk is accumulating faster than the deal narrative admits.
No. It means the deal should proceed only with the high-scoring risks named, owned and priced. Some of the best acquisitions score high at first pass; the difference is that disciplined acquirers make the score fall before they sign.
Adviser models are strongest on valuation and weakest on the questions here: culture, alignment, rationale drift. They are also produced by parties paid on completion, which is not a criticism, but is a reason for one measure that carries no fee interest.
The questions are written for the acquiring side, but a seller can invert them usefully: a buyer with shifting rationale, contested alignment and compressed diligence is a completion risk for the seller too.