M&A
The telecom liability that shows up after every acquisition
When you buy a property or a portfolio company, you inherit its bills. They arrive in the seller's name, at the seller's PO box, for services nobody told you about. When they go unpaid, your lights go dark.
Every acquisition comes with a clean data room and a messy reality. Your model assumed a run-rate. Diligence covered the leases, the debt, the headcount. What it almost never covers is the telecom, technology, and utility spend: the operational plumbing that doesn’t transfer cleanly and isn’t anyone’s job to check.
What you actually inherit
When a property or a portfolio company changes hands, the underlying service contracts may not move with it. The bills keep going to the previous owner’s name, at the previous owner’s address. Which creates two failure modes, both expensive:
- You keep paying for services you don’t know exist. The accounts were never inventoried, so they roll forward. Circuits, lines, redundant SD-WAN, utility meters at sites you’ve half-forgotten: all of it quietly draining OPEX you underwrote as savings.
- A critical service gets cut. The bill goes to a PO box no one forwards. It goes unpaid. And the provider acts. We have seen a utility company physically remove the electric meter from an acquired building because the bill, still in the seller’s name, never reached the new owner. Operations halt. The emergency reconnect costs a multiple of what the bill ever did.
Neither of these is hypothetical. Both leave a mark. And the second time it happens, the operator goes looking for a partner to help.
The fix is boring, which is the point
The answer isn’t heroics. It’s customer-of-record governance as a routine part of every acquisition and every divestiture. Each account gets re-routed to the correct owner, on a known billing platform, paid on time. Because TruNorth pays the bills directly, the transfer simply happens. On the way in, nothing you bought gets shut off. On the way out, a property you sold stops billing you the day it’s no longer yours.
Why it matters at the multiple
For a portfolio buyer, this is not a cost line. It’s enterprise value. Recurring OPEX you remove flows to EBITDA, and EBITDA flows to your exit multiple. A building or a portfolio company that’s never been audited is, almost by definition, carrying years of accumulated waste. One marquee tower we’re in had never been technology-audited in fifty years. There are, as the founder puts it, a lot of dead circuits buried in that building.
The diligence you didn’t run is the savings you left on the table, or the meter you’ll be reconnecting at 2 a.m.
Acquiring or divesting? A pre-deal spend audit validates the run-rate before you sign. Book 15 minutes or run the Phantom Tax check.