I am in the due diligence period attempting to acquire a established commercial cleaning business and found out that a number of the contracts are not assignable. They have to be manually agreed upon again after the sale. This was not known to me at the beginning when I made the offer and I consider this to come with a degree of risk as some might decide to not sign the contract.
Any thoughts or recommendations on the best way to address?
You mentioned the contracts are material and I was in a similar situation with my deal. I insisted that the sellers get the clients to sign the transfer agreement before we closed. Those clients were simply too important and without them the deal wasn't worth doing. The sellers were very reluctant to do this for obvious reasons but they understood my position and we waited until the very end of DD so all the other hurdles had been crossed.