Good financial work is not sector-specific. The discipline required to build a credible business plan for a crypto gateway company is the same discipline required to build a financial model that convinces a Central European bank to lend €4 million. The numbers differ. The rigour does not.
Over the past several years we have worked across sectors that have little in common on the surface — technology, agriculture, animal feed — but whose owners faced similar challenges: they needed financial work that would hold up under scrutiny. From a potential acquirer. From a bank's credit committee. From a buyer conducting due diligence on a transaction.
Three of those engagements are worth examining in detail, because together they illustrate something that applies to almost every business we work with.
The Three Engagements
The client was an early-stage company building a fiat-to-crypto gateway — a payments infrastructure business operating in the decentralised finance space. The founders had strong technical capability and a clear product vision. What they needed was a structured business plan that could articulate the commercial opportunity, the revenue model, the cost structure, and the path to profitability in terms that external parties could evaluate.
We built the full business plan from the ground up — market positioning, competitive landscape, financial projections, and a narrative that translated a technically complex product into a fundable proposition. The plan was designed not just to describe the business but to demonstrate that the founders understood the financial realities of building it.
The company launched, built its product, and subsequently attracted acquisition interest. Within months of the plan being completed, the business was acquired — a transaction that validated both the market opportunity and the commercial framework we had built around it.
An agricultural business in Central Europe needed to finance a significant equipment purchase and operational expansion. The route was a bank loan — and the bank required a financial model that could demonstrate the business's ability to service the debt over time.
We built an initial five-year model covering revenue projections, cost structure, EBITDA, debt service coverage, and working capital requirements. The bank reviewed it and came back with questions — they wanted to see a longer horizon. We rebuilt the model on a ten-year basis, adjusting the assumptions to reflect the longer repayment period while maintaining the integrity of the projections.
The extended model addressed the bank's concerns directly. The credit committee approved the loan. The business secured €4 million in financing for the equipment and expansion it needed — not because the opportunity was self-evident, but because the financial case was made clearly and credibly.
"The bank did not reject the first model. They asked for more. That is a different kind of response — it means they are engaged. The ten-year version gave them what they needed to say yes."
A mid-market animal feed company was considering a sale. The owner had been running the business for years and had a general sense of what it was worth — but no defensible, documented basis for that figure. A prospective buyer would need more than an instinct.
We conducted a full company valuation — bottom-up financial analysis, normalised EBITDA, comparable company analysis, and a DCF-based enterprise value. The output gave the owner a credible, documented number to take into the transaction process. It also identified the assumptions that most affected the valuation, so the owner understood where negotiating leverage existed and where it did not.
The transaction completed at €3.5M. The valuation work did not just support the deal — it structured the conversation with the buyer from the outset, because both parties were working from the same financial foundation rather than arguing from incompatible positions.
The Consistent Lesson
Three different sectors. Three different types of financial work. Three different counterparties — an acquirer, a bank, a buyer. And in each case, the outcome depended not on the quality of the underlying business alone, but on the quality of the financial case made for it.
This is the lesson that runs through every engagement we work on. A good business with poor financial documentation is a harder sell than a good business with a clear, defensible financial story. The financial work does not create value that isn't there. But it makes the value that is there legible — to the people who need to act on it.
A business plan for an acquirer, a model for a bank, and a valuation for a buyer each require different structures and different emphases. The underlying business is the same. The financial presentation cannot be.
The bank that asked for a ten-year model was not being difficult. They were doing their job. The right response is to meet that scrutiny with better work — not to find a more accommodating counterparty.
We worked across DeFi, agriculture, and animal feed in these three cases. The sector context matters. But the discipline of building a model that holds together under questioning is the same in every industry.
In the animal feed transaction, the valuation meant both parties started from the same place. That is not a small thing. Negotiations that begin with a shared financial foundation close more reliably than those that begin with a gap.
"The financial model your counterparty receives is often their first real impression of how you run your business. It tells them whether you understand your own numbers — and whether you can be taken seriously."