CPG Due Diligence: The Operator Framework Behind a $1B Exit | Keith Levy Part 1
Release Date: 04/23/2026
How to Build a Deal Model That Beats PE on Price
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Buyers who mistake a high LOI bid for a winning strategy are easy prey for sellers who know the growth equity playbook. Jeremy Segal's position: precision at the LOI stage is a stronger differentiator than price. Jeremy Segal is EVP of Corporate Development at Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), a publicly traded software company that has nearly doubled revenue through M&A, from under $400 million to nearly $1 billion. He has closed roughly 50 acquisitions across his career at Progress, LogMeIn, and Akamai. How do you build a cost-optimization model before LOI for lines you know you can execute?...
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The People You Lose in M&A: Key Talent Retention Before Close
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The people who leave post-close are usually the ones the deal depended on. Which means the problem starts with how you read culture before LOI and whether financial incentives are the only retention tool you are building with. Haseeb Jawad heads corporate development at Commvault, running a lean team with full accountability from sourcing through integration. He has led two to three acquisitions per year across multiple companies, sat on both sides of a transaction, and serves as his own IMO lead. The signals that tell you a deal will lose people are visible from the first founder...
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How to Buy Companies That Aren't Profitable Yet
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Venture-backed companies are priced at their future state, not their current revenue. When growth stalls and another fundraising round stops making sense, the gap between VC valuation and what a strategic buyer will pay becomes the hardest conversation in any deal process. Matt Arsenault, VP of Corporate Development & Strategic Alliances at Jamf, has run this play across hundreds of targets. His work starts before the deal does, with the founder relationship, the cap table, and a clear-eyed conversation about risk tolerance that most corp dev teams never have. What You'll Learn ...
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When Deals Get Weird: Stories You Don't See in the CIM
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, , , , , , , and Eight deal professionals share the M&A moments that never make the CIM. A birthday cake in a management presentation that confirmed a culture fit and influenced a bid. A buyer who died before close, forcing a nine-month restart from scratch. Eight years of customer revenue data on a 1980s IBM that management claimed did not exist. A target quietly heading toward Chapter 11 while diligence was underway. Unexpected events mid-deal are not exceptions. They are the deal. How you read them is what separates experienced practitioners from everyone else. What You'll Learn:...
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The Real Work Behind the Close: When Judgment Beats the Checklist
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, , , , and Winning a banker-run auction at 5% under the highest bid. Closing a deal when co-sellers have not spoken in months. Getting through 22 countries of employment complexity with a client who refused to work with EOR providers. Acquiring a Netherlands-based public company and discovering the due diligence documents were in Dutch. These are the problems that no playbook prepares you for. Four corp dev professionals share how they handled them, and what it cost when they got it wrong. What You'll Learn How to win a competitive auction when you’re not the highest bidder What...
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The Nordic Compounder Playbook: How Jörgen Wigh Runs 85 Companies With 22 HQ Staff and No Integration
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Lagercrantz Group has completed 90+ acquisitions over 20 years and never sold one. CEO Jörgen Wigh runs 85 niche B2B companies under a 22-person headquarters with no integration, no exits, and no value realization targets. This is Part 2 of 2. , while Part 2 is the operating culture. Jörgen gets into how 85 autonomous companies are governed without a matrix structure, why this model exists almost exclusively in the Nordics, what makes a founder walk away from a signed deal twice, why Lagercrantz deliberately targets a 10% failure rate, and what he would do differently starting from scratch...
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The Nordic Compounder Playbook: How Lagercrantz Bought 90 Companies and Never Sold One
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Jörgen Wigh has been CEO of Lagercrantz Group (STO: LAGR-B) for over 20 years. In that time he completed 90+ acquisitions, built a portfolio of 85 niche B2B companies, and delivered 15 consecutive years of record earnings per share. No capital raises. No forced integration. No exits. The Nordic compounder model has quietly outperformed global markets for decades, and Lagercrantz is one of the longest-running, most disciplined examples of it in operation. In Part 1 of 2, Jörgen walks through the deal model behind that track record. What You'll Learn How Lagercrantz finds...
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M&A Integration Technology: What Actually Works
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| | | Four integration leaders from Intel, Coursera, Ansys, and UKG debate what integration technology actually delivers versus what creates expensive overhead and where the real value leaks are. Todd Manley, Jim Buckley, Carey Pugh, and Mahesh Ganesan bring decades of deal experience to a conversation with no presentations and no curated answers. What You'll Learn Why the diligence-to-integration handoff keeps failing and what actually fixes it How to evaluate integration technology without getting sold on complexity Where AI is genuinely useful in integration today and where it is not...
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Partner Before You Buy: The Pre-Acquisition Strategy Corp Dev Teams Skip
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Corp dev teams treat M&A and partnerships as separate tracks, but Tomer Stavitsky looks at them holistically. In this episode, he breaks down the partner-first approach: an acquisition framework for situations where the target isn't ready, the PE owner isn't selling, or your integration capacity isn't there. He walks us through structuring the partnership, keeping the acquisition thesis alive through execution, negotiating and defending a right of first refusal, and managing the three-way stakeholder dynamic without signaling the wrong things at the wrong time. What You'll Learn ...
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How M&A Turns a Chemical Company Into a Tech Business
M&A Science
Chandradev Mehta, SVP Strategy and Business Development at Hexion Inc., breaks down how a commodity chemical company uses M&A to transform into a technology-enabled, chemistry-as-a-service business. He covers the acquisition of an AI and MarTech company, the build vs. buy vs. partner decision framework, integration planning discipline, banker selection, small deal execution, and JV governance. What You'll Learn How to build a genuine build vs. buy vs. partner framework and when each is right Why buying a commercialized or near-commercialized business changes your risk profile in...
info_outlineKeith Levy, Operating Partner at Sonoma Brands Capital
Keith Levy backed an exit of just under $1B and a $400M exit using the same five-pillar framework, and he starts with the founder every time. Finance comes last.
As Operating Partner at Sonoma Brands Capital, Keith has spent six years evaluating consumer brands across food, beverage, pet food, snacks, and cosmetics. Before that he was CMO at Anheuser-Busch through the $52B InBev deal, president of Royal Canin USA for Mars, and the strategic acquirer who led the Kind acquisition at Mars Wrigley. He knows what the data room doesn't show you, and this conversation is built around that gap.
The first of two episodes covers the full five-pillar CPG diligence framework and the Touchland and Boon's case studies. The second episode, out the following week, covers CPG brand lifecycle, exit positioning, and capital allocation.
What You'll Learn
- Why the founder evaluation comes before the financials.
- How to read product-market fit the way an operator does, not a financial analyst.
- What a credible go-to-market strategy looks like vs. one that crashes in execution.
- Why supply chain control is now a diligence requirement, not an afterthought.
- How to get the right operators inside a strategic acquirer interested before a banker calls.
- The Touchland case study: under $1B exit in less than two years
- The Bachan’s Japanese BBQ sauce case study: ($400M) exit with McCormick at the table.
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If you evaluate consumer brand investments and want a framework for the risks the model won't surface, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the practitioner playbook. Join at mascience.com/membership.
Already a member? The bonus conversation with Keith is live now: boards, earnouts, and the hardest lessons from six years backing consumer brands, exclusively for M&A Science members.
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This episode is sponsored by DealRoom
DealMax starts Monday.
Find us at the Aria
DealRoom: Booth 109,
M&A Science: Booth 208.
Kison will be signing copies of Buyer-Led M&A all three days, and we've got a candy bar and swag worth stopping for. Then, join us monday night for a happy hour, RSVP here: https://hubs.ly/Q043VnNH0
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Episode Chapters
[00:00:00] Intro
[00:02:02] Keith’s background overview (24 years at AB, $52B InBev deal – narrated)
[00:05:40] Running Royal Canin and joining Mars / Mars Wrigley
[00:08:45] Why Mars acquired Kind
[00:09:15] What is Sonoma Brands and how Keith got there
[00:10:17] The Budweiser CMO era & favorite ads
[00:15:12] The Mars / Wrigley China integration
[00:23:15] How Sonoma Brands evolved from venture to growth equity
[00:25:11] Why deals don’t work and what Sonoma changed
[00:27:12] The Keith Levy CPG diligence framework
[00:30:04] How to evaluate a founder
[00:35:40] What product‑market fit actually looks like
[00:38:32] Touchland: under $1B exit in two years
[00:39:05] Go‑to‑market: sequencing channels & steady growth
[00:41:10] Why TAM is just a sniff test
[00:43:31] Why how you make the product matters more than you think
[00:47:08] The real value an operating partner brings