Due diligence verifies what a business produced.
CLTR Diligence examines what produced it.
Behind Every Number Is a Culture Worth Examining.
Due diligence is designed to verify the story the financials tell. It examines what a business has produced, the revenue, the margins, the operational performance, with rigor and precision. What it almost never examines is what produced those results.
Jessamyn Jones founded CLTR Diligence after twelve years litigating on the employer side, defending companies against employment claims and working through the wreckage of commercial disputes when deals went wrong. She watched broken culture generate claims, erode operational performance, and surface in failed transactions as the variable nobody had examined before close. That litigation background is what makes CLTR Diligence different: culture assessed not as a soft concern but as the operating condition that determines whether the value in a transaction holds.
Culture is the mechanism underneath every number in the data room. It determines how decisions get made, how teams perform under pressure, how leadership holds through transition, and whether what a buyer is paying for will still be there after close. CLTR Diligence brings culture due diligence into the deal lifecycle as a measurable variable, assessing the conditions that generated durable performance, identifying what puts that performance at risk, and giving buyers, investors, and founders the complete picture that standard diligence leaves out. Every engagement is custom developed, scoped to your transaction, your timeline, and the specific questions your deal requires answering.
Private Equity Culture Diligence
Hold Period Culture Assessment
A PE firm enters a transaction with a value creation agenda. That agenda has to move through the people inside the acquired company, and whether the organization can absorb it, execute against it, and sustain performance across the hold period is a culture question. Most private equity diligence processes never ask it.
CLTR Diligence: PE brings rigorous culture diligence into the pre-deal process, assessing the cultural conditions of a prospective acquisition target before close. The work examines organizational health, leadership durability, key-person and founder dependency, retention exposure, and the organization's capacity to absorb change without breaking down. Findings are translated into the language of hold-period performance and exit optionality, not engagement scores, giving your team a clear read on what will support the investment thesis and what puts it at risk before you are committed to finding out the hard way.
If the investment thesis depends on execution, the culture question belongs in diligence.
Culture Due Diligence in Mergers and Acquisitions
M&A Culture Risk Assessment
Every transaction carries a culture risk that does not appear in the data room. The financial performance a buyer is underwriting was produced by cultural conditions, how decisions get made, how accountability functions, how leadership holds under pressure, how the organization responds to change. Those conditions determine whether the performance survives the transaction. Standard M&A diligence does not examine them.
CLTR Diligence: M&A brings culture risk assessment into the transaction process as a measurable variable. Depending on where you are in the deal lifecycle and what your transaction requires, the work may involve assessing the culture of the target organization before close, evaluating the integration complexity between two distinct cultures, or designing the post-close integration roadmap for bringing them together successfully. Each M&A culture engagement is scoped to the specific transaction and the specific risks it presents, giving practitioners a rigorous read on the variable that most often determines whether a deal performs the way the model said it would.
What the diligence process missed is not a hypothetical. The scoping conversation is where we make it concrete.
Founder Exit Culture Preparation
Culture as a Valuation Lever
A founder preparing for a transaction is preparing to hand a buyer the evidence that justifies the price. The financials tell part of that story. The culture that produced them tells the rest, and it is almost never documented. What a buyer is purchasing is not just historical performance. It is the conditions that will continue to produce performance after the founder is no longer in the room. Most founders walk into a transaction without the language to defend what generated their results or a plan for ensuring it survives the deal.
CLTR Diligence: Founder works with founders at two distinct moments in the exit preparation process.
Exit Preparation
For founders moving toward a sale, culture documentation is both a valuation instrument and a continuity plan. A founder who can articulate what cultural conditions produced their results, and demonstrate that those conditions are embedded in the organization rather than dependent on their presence, is in a fundamentally stronger negotiating position. The work assesses the culture the founder built, identifies where it is genuinely organizational and where it remains founder-dependent, and produces the documentation that makes culture legible as a valuation lever in the data room.
Push-Out Protection
For founders entering a transaction with continuity expectations who may find their position shifting post-close, culture documentation is a legal instrument as much as a strategic one. The representations made about business performance during a transaction are implicitly representations about the cultural conditions that produced it. A founder who has formally assessed and articulated their culture has standing that a founder who kept it in their head does not, and that standing matters when post-close disputes arise.
The documentation that protects what you built starts well before the LOI arrives.
How This Works
Every CLTR Diligence engagement begins before the work itself: with a conversation about your deal, your timeline, and the specific questions your transaction requires answering. What follows is custom designed around that conversation, not around a predetermined methodology.
The process, across all engagement types, moves in four stages.
The Scoping Conversation.
A confidential discussion of your deal: the type of transaction, where you are in the process, what you already know, and what you need to know before close or before integration begins. This conversation determines whether an engagement makes sense and what it should look like.
Custom Engagement Design.
Based on the scoping conversation, an engagement structure is developed specific to your deal: scope, methodology, timeline, and the form of the output. Deliverables are defined before work begins, not after.
The Assessment.
Culture assessment is conducted using CLTR's proprietary methodology, adapted to the deal context. Depending on the engagement, this may involve structured interviews, document review, behavioral observation, diagnostic instruments, or a combination. The work moves at the pace the deal requires.
Findings and Translation.
Findings are translated into the language of deal performance: value at risk, retention exposure, integration complexity, hold-period implications, exit optionality. The output is designed to be used in the room where decisions are made.
What You Receive
Every CLTR Diligence engagement produces written findings translated into deal language. Not culture-speak. Not engagement scores. A clear read on what the cultural conditions of the organization mean for value, risk, and performance in the context of your specific transaction.
The format depends on the engagement: a pre-close culture risk assessment, a post-close integration roadmap, founder culture documentation, or a combination. In every case, the output is scoped before work begins and designed to be used where the deal is decided.
Frequently Asked Questions
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HR due diligence examines the employment structure: headcount, compensation, benefits, agreements, and pending claims. It does not examine the cultural conditions that determine whether that headcount stays, performs, and executes the integration agenda. CLTR Diligence works in the gap between what HR diligence can see and what determines whether the deal performs after close.
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That depends on the engagement type and what you need to know. For PE pre-deal diligence, the most valuable moment is before LOI or during exclusivity: before you are committed to finding out the hard way what the culture looks like under pressure. For M&A practitioners, engagement can begin at any point in the diligence process or extend into integration planning. For founders, the work is most powerful when it begins well before the sale process opens, not after the LOI arrives.
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No. The work is scoped to your timeline. Transactions move fast, and CLTR Diligence is designed to move with them. The scoping conversation establishes what is achievable within your window and what that work will tell you.
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Written findings translated into deal language: a clear read on what the cultural conditions mean for value, risk, and performance in your specific transaction. The format is defined in the scoping process: a pre-close culture risk assessment, a post-close integration roadmap, founder culture documentation, or a combination. Deliverables are scoped before work begins.
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No. CLTR Diligence is culture strategy work informed by a litigation background, not legal representation. Jessamyn's twelve years as an employment-defense litigator inform how she reads cultural risk and its downstream legal implications. CLTR Diligence does not provide legal advice and is not a substitute for legal counsel.
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It means the engagement is designed around what your transaction requires, not around a predetermined service package. Culture risk looks different in a PE-backed manufacturing company than in a founder-owned services firm. The methodology, timeline, and deliverables are determined by your deal.