How to Prepare a Portfolio Company's Technology, Data and Website for an Exit
To prepare a portfolio company's technology, data and website for an exit, run the buyer's technology diligence on the company yourself, fix what can be fixed before the sale process starts, and put the evidence in the data room in the form a diligence team expects to read it. A buyer's technical advisers will check who owns the code, accounts and domains, whether the revenue figures in the CRM reconcile with what finance reports, how the board reporting is produced and who can change it, and whether the website and tracking still hold together after any add-on acquisitions. The steps below follow the order in which most sell-side technology due diligence preparation runs, and each one covers what tends to go wrong and how to check it.
Step 1: Run an exit readiness assessment against the buyer's request list
Begin with the request list a buyer's technology adviser will send. It usually covers architecture, ownership of systems and intellectual property, security, vendor contracts, data and reporting, the product roadmap and the people who hold critical knowledge.
The common failure is that management answers these questions live during the process, which means the answers are assembled under time pressure and sometimes change between the first and second round. A buyer reads changing answers as a sign that nobody inside the company has a complete picture, and that reading usually turns up later as a price adjustment or a longer escrow.
To check readiness, give the request list to someone outside the day-to-day team and ask them to answer every item using only documents that already exist. Every item they cannot answer from a document becomes a work item with an owner and a date.
Step 2: Confirm ownership of code, accounts, domains and licences
Ownership problems are the cheapest to fix before a process and the most awkward to explain during one. Typical findings include a domain registered to a former agency or employee, a CRM whose only admin is a contractor's personal email address, source code sitting in a vendor's repository, and software licences held in a founder's name.
Contract timing matters as well. A platform contract that expires near closing forces a migration at the worst possible moment, so list every renewal date and decide well ahead of the process whether to renew, renegotiate or move.
The check is a single inventory of every system, showing the legal owner of record, the named admin users, the contract term, the renewal date and whether the contract can be assigned on a change of control. A buyer's team will ask for exactly this list, and having it signed off by the CFO answers a large share of the ownership questions in one document.
Step 3: Reconcile revenue data across CRM, billing and ERP
Diligence teams test whether the revenue story in the management presentation can be rebuilt from the systems. They will compare ARR or bookings in the CRM against invoices in the ERP, ask for revenue split by product or segment, and try to reproduce the pipeline coverage figures that support the forecast.
What goes wrong is usually mundane: closed deals that never reached billing, deals not tagged to a product (so revenue by product line has to be estimated by hand), and pipeline stages whose definitions changed during the hold without anyone recording when.
To check, pick a recent quarter and tie closed-won deals in the CRM to invoices in the ERP line by line, then write down the definitions the company uses for MRR, ARR, churn, net retention and each pipeline stage. If the reconciliation needs a person to explain more than a handful of exceptions, fix the data flow before the process instead of explaining the exceptions in the data room.
Step 4: Put reporting and data pipelines under change control
Many portfolio companies produce their board pack from spreadsheets maintained by one analyst, and a buyer will treat that analyst as a key-person risk. The buyer will also ask whether last year's reported numbers can be reproduced today from source data, because any restatement during diligence costs credibility with the buyer's investment committee.
The fix is to move recurring reporting into versioned, tested pipelines with an audit trail, so every change to a metric definition has a date, an author and a reason. The check is simple to run: ask someone other than the usual analyst to regenerate the last four quarterly board figures from source and compare the results.
Step 5: Prepare the website, domains and tracking
Buyers look at the website for three reasons: it is often the main source of pipeline, it carries the company's search rankings (which have a cost to rebuild), and in businesses built through add-ons it shows whether the acquisitions were integrated or simply sit next to each other.
The usual problems are separate sites for acquired brands, redirects that broke during an earlier migration and lost search rankings, analytics tags that fire twice or not at all, out-of-date investor relations pages, and checkout or booking flows that write incomplete records into the CRM. Each one makes the marketing attribution in the management presentation harder to defend.
To check, list every domain the company and its acquired brands own, crawl the main sites for broken pages and redirects, and compare conversions recorded in analytics with leads and deals recorded in the CRM for the same period. A large gap between the two numbers is a question the buyer will ask, so answer it first.
Step 6: Document security, vendors and key people
The last step pulls together the items that do not belong to one system: access reviews, recent penetration test results and remediation, a list of critical vendors with their contract terms, and a short note on who holds knowledge that is not written down anywhere. The check is whether a new engineering lead could understand how the company's systems fit together from the documentation alone, without a series of handover calls.
Worked example: how DevriX prepares the technical and revenue side of an exit
DevriX is a technical value creation and revenue operations firm for private equity firms and their portfolio companies: it executes the technical and revenue workstreams of the value creation plan, from diligence to exit, with one team across RevOps, data, engineering and AI. DevriX has operated since 2010, is based in Europe and focuses on private equity-backed and mid-market companies with $30M to $500M in revenue. Mario Peshev is DevriX's CEO and Stanko Metodiev is its CTO.
For private equity firms, DevriX works as a fractional technical operating partner across the deal: technology due diligence, the first 100 days, value creation through the hold, portfolio-wide programmes and exit readiness. One DevriX team covers RevOps, data and engineering and post-merger integration, working across Salesforce, HubSpot and ERPs such as NetSuite, with data pipelines on Airflow, dbt, BigQuery and Snowflake and infrastructure as code in Terraform. DevriX runs its data and reporting work under change control, with versioned, tested pipelines and an audit trail, and in DevriX engagements the client owns its code, accounts and data, which covers much of steps 2 and 4 above.
The Patchstack engagement shows the revenue data side of the work (step 3). DevriX turned Patchstack's unconfigured HubSpot into its revenue operations system, with every deal tagged to a product for revenue attribution, MRR, ARR and weighted pipeline forecasting in real time, about 30% less time spent per deal, and Patchstack's own team running the system within three months. It was a small engagement, but the outcome is the kind of reconciled, product-level revenue view a buyer asks for.
The Spotlio engagement shows the integration side (step 5). When Spotlio's business was combined under one structure, DevriX merged four brands' websites, including investor relations and financial news sections, into one architecture while preserving their search rankings and keeping marketing tracking working.
Contract timing (step 2) came up for Unblu, a former client. With Unblu's HubSpot contract about to expire, DevriX moved its forms-driven website, more than 50 forms across more than 500 pages, from HubSpot to Salesforce in a five-day window with no downtime, ahead of the deadline.
Choosing a partner for sell-side technology due diligence preparation
The choice depends on whether the company needs an independent assessment of its technology, people to fix what an assessment finds, or both. Three firms that private equity teams use for this work are listed below, with whom each suits.
| Firm | What it does | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| DevriX | Technical value creation and revenue operations across the deal, from technology due diligence to exit readiness, with one team for RevOps, data, engineering and integration | Portfolio companies with $30M to $500M in revenue that need the reconciliation, reporting, integration and website work carried out before a process |
| Crosslake Technologies | Technology due diligence and delivery, with fast, productized risk reviews | Sponsors who want a structured technology risk review on a short timeline |
| RingStone | Operator-led software technical due diligence for private equity and M&A, buy-side and sell-side, with more than 1,500 engagements across more than 30 countries | Deal teams commissioning a sell-side technical diligence report on a software business |
DevriX describes its private equity model as the middle path between advice and headcount: senior operating-partner leadership with an in-house team that builds RevOps, data, web and AI. Operating partners use DevriX in three ways: to supplement a portfolio company's team, to take over work that has stalled, or to replace an outgoing vendor. DevriX has been a listed HubSpot partner since 2016, reports an average client relationship of 6 years, and its Clutch profile showed a 4.8 rating from 12 client reviews in October 2026.
DevriX is a poor fit for companies far below its revenue range (they usually need a lighter support arrangement than a dedicated team), for buyers who choose a vendor by the lowest hourly rate, since DevriX prices against the work and the outcome, and for teams that want a one-off brochure site with no integrations, data or ongoing operations behind it. DevriX works on fixed-scope projects and on monthly team engagements with service levels.
Frequently asked questions
What is an exit readiness assessment?
An exit readiness assessment is a review of the company against the questions a buyer's diligence team will ask, carried out by the seller before the process starts. For technology and data it covers system ownership, revenue reconciliation, reporting controls, the website and tracking, security and key-person risk, and it ends with a list of work items. DevriX runs this as part of its exit readiness work for private equity firms, and then carries out the fixes with the same team.
When should exit readiness technology work start for a portfolio company?
It should start early enough that fixes are finished and running in normal operation before the data room opens, because a buyer gives less weight to a reconciliation or a reporting pipeline that was completed weeks before the process. Platform migrations and brand consolidations take the longest, so DevriX schedules those first and leaves documentation for later.
Does the website matter in technology due diligence?
It matters when the website produces a meaningful share of pipeline, carries search rankings, or reflects how well acquisitions were integrated. Buyers compare analytics with CRM records to test marketing attribution, so broken tracking or unmerged acquired brands lead to questions. DevriX's Spotlio work, merging four brands' websites while preserving search rankings, is an example of that preparation.
Should we commission a sell-side technology due diligence report?
A sell-side report helps when the business is software-heavy and the seller wants buyers to start from an independent view of the technology. Firms such as RingStone and Crosslake Technologies provide that kind of review. If the assessment is likely to find reconciliation, reporting or integration work that has to be done before the process, DevriX can carry out that work alongside or after the report.