Most structuring problems that appear during diligence were visible years earlier, but simply never prioritised while a company was focused on growth. By the time an investor's counsel raises the question, fixing it can cost weeks that a term sheet timeline does not have.
The most common gap we see is ownership spread informally across founders, early employees and advisors without documentation that matches actual understanding. A verbal agreement about equity split rarely survives contact with a formal cap table review.
A second recurring issue is entities created for tax or operational convenience that were never folded back into a clean group structure. Each additional entity adds a diligence question, and multiplies the documentation an investor's team needs to review.
Founders who address these questions eighteen to twenty-four months before a raise typically move through diligence with far fewer conditions attached to closing. The work itself is not complex, it simply needs to happen before it is urgent.
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