5 Lessons on M&A Readiness From a PE-Backed CFO
When Arctic Glacier Premium Ice was sold by The Carlyle Group to Reddy Ice earlier this year, the deal had already been in motion for more than a year. For many finance teams, that kind of timeline becomes a pressure point. For Arctic Glacier, it did not.
What CFO Stephanie Choudri described in a recent interview with CFO.com closely aligns with what we see across PE-backed finance teams—including at Arctic Glacier, where Tesorio is part of the stack. M&A readiness is not something you create during a transaction. It’s the result of building the right financial foundation long before a buyer even comes to the table.
For CFOs at private equity-backed companies, this story is familiar. The question was never if there would be a transaction: it was when, and whether the business would be ready.
Here are 5 key lessons for finance teams preparing for M&A in 2026 and beyond…
1. Build reporting that travels outside your organization.
Internal reporting rarely travels well. Shorthand that makes sense to your team, workarounds everyone just knows about, metrics that don’t quite match how buyers define them. None of that survives a diligence process. Choudri noted that a significant portion of the work during the Arctic Glacier transaction was simply aligning how the two companies reported and accounted for things, even where the underlying economics were the same.
How legible is your reporting to someone who has never worked inside your business? Finance teams that can answer that confidently move through diligence differently.
2. Get your AR in order before anyone asks.
Diligence puts your AR under a microscope. Aging accuracy, collection rates, DSO, payment behavior across your customer base: buyers read these numbers as a signal of how well the business is run, as well as how much it is owed. If your AR data is inconsistent or hard to produce cleanly, it creates questions you don’t want to be answering mid-process. The time to fix that is long before a deal is in motion.
3. Know the difference between cash flow reporting and cash flow visibility.
Reporting tells you what happened. Visibility tells you what is happening and where it is going. For a buyer, the difference matters. AR aging that is accurate, collections behavior that is consistent, forecasts that hold up under scrutiny: these are not just diligence deliverables. They are signals about how well the business is run.
Can you show a buyer real-time payment behavior across your customer base and a forecast built on reliable data? Or would you be pulling together spreadsheets as questions come in?
4. Own the operational story, not just the financials.
Buyers evaluate businesses on operational health, not just revenue and EBITDA. DSO, working capital efficiency, collection rates: these numbers reveal whether a business runs well, not just whether it grows. Choudri described finance as the connective tissue across the organization. When finance owns the operational story behind the numbers, CFOs become a different kind of partner in a transaction. Not just preparing schedules. Shaping how the business is understood.
5. The window to prepare is earlier than you think.
The 12 to 24 months before a transaction is when the real work happens. Tightening the close, automating manual processes, building cash flow visibility, you can defend in a room full of advisors. By the time diligence starts, that window has closed.
The CFOs who move through M&A cleanly are not the ones who react fastest under pressure. They are the ones who were already running their function as if a transaction were always possible.
The Bottom Line
These five lessons are worth applying whether a transaction is imminent or years away. When Stephanie Choudri and the Arctic Glacier finance team went through diligence, they were drawing on foundations already in place: clean reporting, reliable AR data, real-time cash flow visibility, and a clear operational story. These are the hallmarks of a well-run finance function at any stage. The fact that they also make you M&A-ready is the point. Build the function right, and the readiness follows.