Akeel JabberInvestment Director, Horizen Capital · Investor, Entrepreneur and Petroleum Engineer

The secret to a successful exit? Quality of Earnings.

21 Mar 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:54

In this brief interview, a founder (Speaker A) asks what financial and operational levers should be addressed now to position the company for a successful acquisition in 2026. Speaker B advises focusing on revenue integrity and the quality of earnings, ensuring a balanced customer portfolio that includes both enterprise accounts and new logos, and monitoring churn. High churn is flagged as a warning sign of product deficiencies or pricing that makes customers easy to switch, which can undermine acquisition appeal. The discussion underscores that clear, high‑quality earnings metrics and a healthy, diversified client mix are critical to mitigate investor risk and smooth the due‑diligence process.

Chapters

So if a founder maybe today is looking to prepare for an acquisition going into next year, right? 2026, they're in conversations or thinking about being acquired. And they understand that that's part of, you know, they're going to get into some due diligence. What should they fix firsthand inside their numbers today? What should they think about?
Revenue integrity, the quality of earnings, you know, puts a very simple and a very strong figure in front of somebody that, or say if a VC already has a portfolio where there's a lot of enterprise deals. But he wants to mitigate this risk with also, you know, new logos are not going for enterprise deals. So if you have that and he wants that, it could get, you know, into a place where you have a meeting spot and the deal could get transferred. But if even that, if he's looking for such logos, and even if that has very high churn, it simply means there's something wrong with your product or you've priced it in a way where it's very easy to switch.