Off Mandate - Deal Walkaways: When to Kill a Deal
Scott Hile, Jeremy Segal, and Siran Tanielyan have closed a combined 115+ transactions. In this Off Mandate, they're breaking down the walk-away decision from different seats: the strategy and integration perspective and the sourcing and pipeline perspective.
They'll cover where walk-aways actually happen (it's not just diligence), how teams rationalize bad deals after the thesis has already drifted, and what it takes organizationally to pull the trigger when the pressure is telling you to push through.
About
What You'll Hear Debated
- What's your actual philosophy on when to walk and where does conventional wisdom get it wrong?
- Where in the process do most walk-aways happen versus where they should happen?
- If you can't use your acquisition thesis to prioritize diligence, do you even have a thesis?
- What does deal fever look like from the inside and how do you recognize it in yourself?
- Sunk cost logic: the $400K in diligence doesn't justify the $250M close. So why do teams keep acting like it does?
- What do bankers do to keep a deal alive past the point it should die and how do you recognize it when you're the buyer?
- Where does process create real walk-away discipline and where does it just create cover for bad decisions?
- The walk-away call as a career risk; who actually has the standing to make it?
Agenda
No scripts. No presentations. No polished “best practices.”
Think of it like eavesdropping on a conversation between friends who've been in the trenches except it's recorded so other practitioners can learn from it too.
The goal: real debate, real disagreements, real lessons. Not polished talking points.
