Most searchers spend months diligencing the financials of a business they want to buy. Very few spend meaningful time on risk and insurance before they close - and that gap can be expensive. On October 15th at 11 AM ET, I'm sitting down with Vin Gandolfo, President of WithCoverage's Industrials Practice, for a live webinar on how strategic risk diligence can protect your deal and your business. Here's what we're covering: We'll open with a real case study - claims history, loss diligence, and the red flags that show up in insurance records that don't show up anywhere else in a typical diligence process. Then we'll do a live diligence Q&A with an acquisition entrepreneur who is actively raising funds for a manufacturing business, walking through how WithCoverage would actually think about risk diligence in that deal in real time. Insurance is often one of the biggest line items in a trades or services business; HVAC, landscaping, and manufacturing companies can spend six figures annually on coverage. Most of that spend is managed by a generalist broker who doesn't specialize in the industry or the risk profile of the business you're buying. WithCoverage is different: a team of insurance experts, attorneys, and claims specialists who work specifically in your type of business, with in-house risk attorneys included at no extra cost. Partner Perspective: Dustin Campbell, CultureWise: You Don’t Trade Performance for Culture Years ago my partner Erik told me that some of the best leadership books he’d read were parenting books. I’ve used the line ever since, and I always finish it the same way: not because your employees are like children, but because your children are human. Psychology has advanced enormously in the last forty years. Children today are benefiting from parents and teachers coaching their behaviors. Managerial practice – often focused on hiring “A-players” – has been slower to catch on. Most corporate culture work is still values on a wall. Harvard Business Review named the problem last year: culture gets treated as branding, not behavior. As output, not infrastructure. McKinsey surveyed 10,000 executives and found three quarters of organizations are failing to build a high-performance culture. That’s not a motivation problem. It’s a method problem. The fix is unglamorous and it follows the evidence. Wendy Wood’s research found that roughly 43% of what people do each day is repeated almost daily, in the same place. Behavior runs on structure far more than on intention. So name the specific behaviors your business runs on, in language a technician would recognize. Not “respect.” Closer to “practice blameless problem solving.” Then build a rhythm that teaches one of those behaviors every week, so the teaching doesn’t depend on you being in the room. Argosy Private Equity has run this across numerous lower middle market companies, the majority of them founder-owned. In one of them they estimated the turnover reduction generated $10 million of enterprise value. Their managing director puts it plainly: “Financial engineering is table stakes… the next frontier is culture.” You are not choosing between performance and culture. Culture is where the performance comes from, and it’s the cheapest system you own. This is what we build at CultureWise. If you’re in your first years of ownership and want to see what it looks like, let’s talk. Plus: • If you're in Chicago (for the Booth/Kellogg ETA Conference or otherwise), come join us for a happy hour on Thursday, October 29th from 4:30 to 7:00 PM at Jefferson Tap and Grille. Hosted by Entrepreneurial Capital, Pioneer Capital Advisory, Rejigg, QoE Prep, Albrecht Law, and CultureWise - drinks and appetizers included. RSVP here. • Drew Eckman flags an important wrinkle in the new SBA rules: lenders can no longer underwrite to trailing twelve months, so DSC ratio must now be satisfied using either the last fiscal year-end or a two-year average. This means a prettier TTM won’t save a deal where the historical financials don’t support the debt load. If you’re evaluating a deal with SBA financing, run the DSC ratio against the historical statements before you get too far in.