Exit Readiness Checklist for Mining Services Portcos

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Why Exit Readiness Matters for Mining Services
2. Financial & Operational Diligence Foundation
3. Technology & Platform Modernisation
4. Security, Compliance & Audit Readiness
5. AI Capability & Automation Rollout
6. Talent, Leadership & Organisational Scalability
7. Market Position & Competitive Benchmarking
8. Exit Positioning & Buyer Narratives
9. Execution Timeline & Quick Wins
10. Summary & Next Steps

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Introduction: Why Exit Readiness Matters for Mining Services {#introduction}

Mining services portfolio companies operate in a sector with well-established exit expectations. Buyers—whether strategic consolidators, infrastructure funds, or mid-market acquirers—bring a rigorous playbook to diligence. They’re looking for three things: clean financials, scalable operations, and a credible technology story.

Unlike venture-scale exits where product-market fit and growth rate dominate, mining services exits hinge on operational maturity, regulatory compliance, and the ability to service large, sticky customer bases reliably. A $50M revenue mining services company with fragmented legacy systems, manual processes, and a security audit gap will trade at a 5–7x multiple. The same company with modern platforms, documented AI-driven automation, SOC 2 readiness, and a fractional CTO-led technical strategy can command 8–12x or more.

This guide is a practical operating partner checklist. It covers the diligence questions you’ll face, the value-creation levers you can pull, and the positioning narrative that makes buyers confident in your exit thesis.

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Financial & Operational Diligence Foundation {#financial-operational}

Revenue Quality & Customer Concentration

Buyers will scrutinise three metrics immediately:

Customer concentration: What percentage of revenue comes from your top 5 customers? Mining services companies with >40% revenue from a single customer face immediate multiple compression. Your first move is to map customer cohorts by contract length, renewal probability, and margin profile. If you have a $100M revenue company with $45M from one customer on a 2-year contract, you’re already signalling exit risk.

Action: Build a customer concentration scorecard. Segment by contract type (fixed, variable, time-and-materials), renewal date, and churn risk. Flag any customer at >15% of revenue for explicit retention planning. Buyers want to see a path to <20% single-customer exposure within 12 months post-acquisition.

Revenue visibility: Mining services contracts vary widely. A drilling services company might have fixed-price, fixed-term contracts (predictable, lower risk). A consulting or engineering services firm might have T&M or retainer models (less predictable). Buyers will ask: What percentage of next year’s revenue is already contracted? What’s your pipeline-to-close conversion rate?

For mining services, a clean answer looks like: “60% of next year’s revenue is contracted and invoiced monthly; 30% is in active proposals with 70% close rate; 10% is new-market expansion.”

Action: Build a forward revenue model by contract type. Show 12–24 months of visibility. If you can’t demonstrate >50% visibility 12 months out, that’s a red flag for buyers. Start now.

Margin stability: Mining services margins are cyclical. Buyers understand this, but they want to see that you’ve insulated your business from commodity cycles through service mix, geographic diversification, or fixed-price contracts. If 80% of your revenue is tied to spot gold or iron ore prices, you’re a commodity play, not a services business.

Action: Analyse your margin drivers. If labour productivity, equipment utilisation, or supply-chain cost is your primary lever, document it. Build a 3-year margin bridge showing how you’ll hold or expand EBITDA margins through the cycle. Buyers want to see 20%+ EBITDA margins for mining services; if you’re at 12%, you need a clear path to 18%+ within 24 months.

Operational Metrics & Benchmarking

Mining services buyers use industry benchmarks from firms like Sibanye-Stillwater, BHP, and Rio Tinto to stress-test your operational claims. You need to know your position relative to peers.

Key operational metrics:

• Revenue per employee: Mining services typically range from $400K to $800K per FTE, depending on service type and geography. Drilling or underground services run higher; engineering or planning services run lower. Buyers will ask: Are you above or below peer average? If below, why? Is it a margin play (higher staff cost, higher-value services) or a productivity gap?

• Utilisation rate: For T&M services, utilisation is everything. Buyers want to see >75% billable utilisation for field staff, >60% for office-based teams. If you’re at 65% field utilisation, you’re leaving 15–20% of potential revenue on the table. That’s a value-creation lever.

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) & lifetime value (LTV): Mining services typically have 12–36 month sales cycles and long contract lives (3–5 years). Your CAC should be recoverable in 18–24 months; your LTV should be 3–5x CAC. If your CAC is 2x annual contract value, that’s a problem.

Action: Build an operational metrics dashboard. Compare yourself to MINING.com reports and peer disclosures. If you’re below peer average on utilisation or revenue per employee, that’s a value-creation opportunity. Document it as a post-acquisition play.

Financial Reporting & Audit Trail

By the time you’re in exit diligence, your financials need to be clean, audited, and explainable. Buyers will spend weeks on your general ledger. Gaps here kill deals.

Non-negotiables:

• Audited financials for the last 2–3 years (or reviewed, if you’re under $50M revenue).
• Clear revenue recognition policy, documented and consistent with ASX or AASB standards.
• Detailed cost-of-goods-sold breakdown by customer, service line, and geography.
• Reconciliation of key metrics (revenue, EBITDA, working capital) to your management accounts.
• A clean audit trail for all material transactions, especially related-party deals or one-off items.

Action: Engage a Big 4 auditor if you haven’t already. Budget $50K–$150K for a proper audit. It’s a sunk cost, but it signals professionalism and saves weeks of diligence delays. If your auditor flags control gaps or revenue recognition issues, fix them now, not during diligence.

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Technology & Platform Modernisation {#technology-modernisation}

Legacy System Inventory & Modernisation Roadmap

Mining services companies often run on a mix of legacy systems: SAP or Oracle ERP from 2005, custom-built scheduling software, spreadsheet-based resource planning, and disconnected safety or compliance tools. Buyers see this and immediately ask: How much technical debt are we inheriting?

Your job is to turn this into a narrative of deliberate modernisation, not crisis management.

Action: Build a technology inventory. List every system in use: ERP, CRM, HRIS, project management, safety/compliance, field-service dispatch, financial reporting. For each, document:

• Current cost (licensing, maintenance, internal support).
• Age and upgrade status.
• Data quality and integration points.
• Business-critical dependencies.
• Modernisation plan (keep, upgrade, replace, retire).

Then, build a 2–3 year modernisation roadmap that shows:

1. Year 1: Retire the worst performers. If you have a 15-year-old field-dispatch system that costs $200K/year to maintain and has 3 engineers supporting it, replace it. Show a 12-month project plan, budget ($300K–$500K), and expected outcome (20% labour reduction, 30% faster dispatch, real-time tracking).

2. Year 2: Integrate core systems. Get your ERP, CRM, and project-management system talking to each other. This unlocks data for analytics and automation.

3. Year 3: Build analytics and automation layers on top. This is where AI and modern tooling create competitive advantage.

Buyers want to see that you’re not running on legacy systems out of inertia, but because you have a deliberate plan to modernise. That plan should cost 1–2% of annual revenue per year and deliver measurable ROI (labour savings, faster billing, better safety reporting).

Platform Engineering & Data Integration

For mining services, data integration is a competitive advantage. If you can pull real-time data from your customer’s mine (via SCADA, historian, or sensor networks), combine it with your internal project and billing data, and surface it in a single dashboard, you’re no longer a services vendor—you’re a partner with embedded intelligence.

Buyers increasingly value this. It’s sticky, defensible, and creates upsell opportunities.

Action: Assess your data integration maturity:

• Level 1 (Manual): You request data from customers via email, load it into spreadsheets, and manually update your systems. This is baseline. Buyers expect you to move beyond this.

• Level 2 (Integrated APIs): You have documented APIs to customer systems or use middleware (like Zapier, IFTTT, or custom connectors) to sync data. This is functional but fragile.

• Level 3 (Embedded Platform): You have a proprietary platform that ingests customer data, applies your business logic, and surfaces insights. This is where you want to be.

If you’re at Level 1 or 2, your modernisation roadmap should include platform engineering: building a data ingestion and analytics layer. For mining services, this often means:

• Connectors to common mining software (Hexagon, Dassault, Maptek, etc.).
• SCADA/historian data pipelines (OPC-UA, Modbus, custom APIs).
• Real-time dashboards for project health, equipment utilisation, safety metrics.
• Predictive-maintenance models (see Platform Development in Perth for technical depth).

Buyers see this and immediately ask: “Can we replicate this across the portfolio?” If you’ve built a generalizable platform, you’ve just created a $5M–$20M value-creation opportunity across a PE portfolio.

AI & Automation Readiness

AI is no longer optional in exit diligence. Buyers—especially large strategics and PE firms—will ask: Where are you using AI? What’s your automation roadmap?

You don’t need to be a cutting-edge AI company. But you need a credible story.

Action: Conduct an automation audit. Map your top 10 time-consuming processes:

1. Proposal generation.
2. Contract management and renewal tracking.
3. Resource scheduling and allocation.
4. Timesheet entry and billing.
5. Invoice reconciliation.
6. Safety incident reporting and analysis.
7. Customer communication and status updates.
8. Compliance documentation (certifications, audits).
9. Equipment maintenance planning.
10. Financial close and reporting.

For each, ask: Can we automate or augment this with AI? Examples:

• Proposal generation: Use LLMs to draft proposals from templates and customer data. Save 20 hours per proposal.
• Resource scheduling: Use constraint-optimization algorithms to allocate staff to projects, minimizing idle time and travel. Improve utilisation by 5–10%.
• Timesheet entry: Use voice-to-text or mobile apps to reduce data-entry burden. Save 2 hours per week per field worker.
• Safety analysis: Use NLP to flag safety incidents from incident reports, extracting patterns and near-misses. Improve incident detection by 30%.
• Customer updates: Use agentic AI to pull project data, generate status summaries, and send proactive updates. Improve customer satisfaction by reducing communication friction.

You don’t need to build all of these. But you need a top-3 priority list with 12-month timelines and ROI estimates. Buyers want to see that you’re thinking operationally about automation, not just hype.

Consider engaging a partner like PADISO for AI & Agents Automation to de-risk this. A fractional CTO or AI-readiness engagement (4–8 weeks, $30K–$80K) can validate your automation thesis and give buyers confidence in execution.

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Security, Compliance & Audit Readiness {#security-compliance}

SOC 2 & ISO 27001 Readiness

If your mining services company handles customer data, operates remotely, or touches critical infrastructure, buyers will expect SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 certification as a precondition of acquisition. This is no longer a “nice-to-have.”

The good news: You don’t need to have achieved certification before exit. You need to be audit-ready.

Action: Assess your current security posture against SOC 2 Trust Service Criteria or ISO 27001. Use a framework like Vanta to automate evidence collection. A typical audit readiness engagement takes 8–12 weeks and costs $40K–$100K.

Key areas buyers will scrutinise:

1. Access control: Who has access to customer data? Is it documented? Are there segregation-of-duties controls? If a single engineer can access all customer systems, that’s a red flag.

2. Data encryption: Is customer data encrypted at rest and in transit? If you’re storing passwords in plain text or transmitting data over HTTP, you’ll fail audit.

3. Incident response: Do you have a documented incident-response plan? Have you tested it? Buyers want to see that you can detect and respond to breaches within hours, not days.

4. Change management: How do you deploy software changes? Is there a change log? Are there approvals? If developers can push to production without oversight, that’s a control gap.

5. Vendor management: Do you vet third-party vendors? Do you have data-processing agreements (DPAs) in place? If you’re using AWS, Salesforce, or other SaaS tools, you need DPAs signed.

6. Backup and disaster recovery: Can you recover from a ransomware attack? Do you test backups? Buyers want to see a tested RTO/RPO plan.

Action: Engage a security audit firm or use PADISO’s Security Audit service to conduct a gap assessment. Then build a remediation roadmap. If you’re 6–8 weeks away from audit readiness, you’re in good shape for exit diligence. If you’re 6+ months away, that’s a risk.

Privacy & Regulatory Compliance

Mining services companies often operate across multiple jurisdictions (Australia, US, Canada, Africa). Each has different privacy rules:

• Australia: Privacy Act 1988, Australian Privacy Principles (APPs).
• US: No federal privacy law, but state laws (California CCPA, Virginia VCDPA, Colorado CPA) and sector-specific rules (HIPAA for health, GLBA for finance).
• Canada: Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA).
• EU: GDPR (if you have any EU customers or operations).

Buyers will ask: Are you compliant in every jurisdiction where you operate? If you’re not sure, that’s a problem.

Action: Map your customer locations and data flows. For each jurisdiction, document:

• What personal data you collect and process.
• Legal basis for processing (contract, consent, legitimate interest).
• Data retention periods.
• Subprocessors and data-transfer agreements.
• Individual rights (access, deletion, portability) and fulfillment processes.

If you’re processing data in Australia, you need Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) for any new processing. If you’re processing data in the US, you need privacy policies that comply with state laws. If you’re processing EU data, you need GDPR-compliant Data Processing Agreements (DPAs) and potentially a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA).

This sounds heavy, but it’s standard diligence. Buyers expect it. If you don’t have it, they’ll assume you’re non-compliant and price accordingly.

Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) Readiness

Mining is an ESG-sensitive sector. Large acquirers and PE firms increasingly have ESG commitments. Buyers will scrutinise your ESG disclosures.

Key areas:

1. Environmental: What’s your carbon footprint? Do you have targets? Are you measuring Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions? If you operate in remote areas (like Darwin or Perth), your logistics footprint is material.

2. Social: Do you have diversity and inclusion metrics? What’s your employee turnover? Your safety record? Mining services is a safety-critical sector; a single major incident can derail an exit.

3. Governance: Do you have independent board oversight? Audit and risk committees? Documented policies on conflicts of interest, whistleblower protection, and anti-corruption? Large acquirers expect this.

Action: Benchmark against peers. Look at Glencore’s or Anglo American’s ESG disclosures. You don’t need to match them, but you should be on the same trajectory. Build a 2-year ESG roadmap showing how you’ll improve on your weakest metrics.

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AI Capability & Automation Rollout {#ai-capability}

AI Strategy & Readiness Assessment

Buyers increasingly ask: Do you have an AI strategy? This doesn’t mean you need to be an AI company. It means you’ve thought about where AI creates value in your business and you have a plan.

Action: Conduct an AI readiness assessment. Ask:

1. Where does AI create the most value? (Process automation, predictive maintenance, customer insights, safety, etc.)
2. What data do you have? (Customer data, operational data, sensor data, historical incident data?)
3. What’s your skill gap? (Do you have data engineers, ML engineers, or do you need to hire/partner?)
4. What’s your execution risk? (Can you build in-house, or do you need a partner?)

Consider engaging a partner like PADISO for an AI Strategy & Readiness engagement. This is a 4–6 week engagement ($25K–$60K) that results in a board-ready AI strategy and a 12-month roadmap. Buyers see this and immediately feel more confident.

Automation Pilots & Quick Wins

Don’t wait for exit to start automating. Run 2–3 automation pilots in the next 6 months. Pick high-impact, low-risk projects:

Example 1: Proposal Automation

Mining services proposals are often 20–50 pages. You’re reusing 80% of the content each time. Use an LLM-powered tool (like OpenAI’s API, Claude, or a specialist tool like Tome or Beautiful.ai) to:

• Ingest your proposal templates.
• Extract customer requirements from RFPs.
• Generate draft proposals automatically.
• Have a human review and customise in 30 minutes instead of 8 hours.

Impact: 20 proposals per year × 7 hours saved = 140 hours saved. At $150/hour (loaded cost), that’s $21K per year. Cost: $500–$2K per month for tooling + 2 weeks of setup. ROI: 10x in year 1.

Example 2: Safety Incident Analysis

Your field teams report incidents via form or email. You manually categorise them, flag patterns, and send alerts. Use NLP to:

• Automatically extract incident details (location, time, equipment, injury type).
• Categorise by root cause (human error, equipment failure, process gap).
• Flag high-risk patterns (e.g., 3+ incidents with the same equipment in 30 days).
• Send proactive alerts to site managers.

Impact: Reduce incident response time from 5 days to 1 day. Prevent 1–2 major incidents per year (value: $500K–$2M in avoided downtime, fines, and liability). Cost: $10K–$30K for tooling + 4 weeks of setup.

Example 3: Resource Scheduling

Your operations team spends 40 hours per week manually scheduling staff to projects. Use a constraint-optimization algorithm to:

• Ingest project requirements, staff availability, and skill matrix.
• Generate optimal schedules that minimise travel, maximise utilisation, and respect preferences.
• Surface trade-offs to human schedulers for final approval.

Impact: 5–10% improvement in utilisation = $2M–$5M in additional revenue (for a $100M company) or cost savings. Cost: $50K–$150K for custom development or $5K–$15K per month for SaaS tooling.

Action: Pick one pilot for Q1, one for Q2. Run each as a 4–8 week project with clear success metrics. Document the results. By the time you’re in exit diligence, you’ll have concrete examples of automation in action.

Data Foundation for AI

AI is only as good as your data. Buyers will ask: What’s your data quality? How are you collecting and storing operational data?

If you don’t have a strong answer, you can’t credibly claim an AI strategy.

Action: Assess your data foundation:

1. Data collection: Are you collecting operational data systematically? (Project timelines, resource utilisation, customer metrics, safety incidents, equipment performance?) Or is it scattered across spreadsheets and emails?

2. Data quality: If you are collecting data, is it clean? Consistent? Documented? Or is it full of gaps, duplicates, and inconsistencies?

3. Data infrastructure: Where is your data stored? Is it in a data warehouse (like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift) where you can run analytics? Or is it siloed in individual systems?

4. Data governance: Do you have policies on data access, retention, and quality? Or is anyone who has database access able to do whatever they want?

If you’re at “spreadsheets and emails,” that’s your first modernisation lever. Spend 8–12 weeks and $50K–$100K to build a basic data warehouse. Ingest data from your ERP, CRM, project-management system, and field-service tools. Once you have clean, centralised data, AI becomes feasible.

Buyers see this and immediately think: “We can run analytics and automation across this company and the rest of our portfolio.” That’s a value-creation narrative.

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Talent, Leadership & Organisational Scalability {#talent-leadership}

Technical Leadership & CTO Function

Buyers will ask: Who’s responsible for technology strategy? Do you have a CTO or equivalent?

If the answer is “We don’t have a CTO; the founder/CEO handles it,” that’s a red flag. It signals that technology is not a strategic priority and that there’s a single point of failure.

Action: If you don’t have a CTO, hire one or engage a fractional CTO. A fractional CTO (20–30 hours per week) costs $15K–$30K per month and provides:

• Strategic technology planning.
• Architecture and platform decisions.
• Engineering hiring and team building.
• Vendor evaluation and negotiations.
• Board-ready technology narratives.

Consider engaging PADISO’s Fractional CTO service (available in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and other locations). A fractional CTO can help you build a credible technology story in 6–12 months, which is exactly the timeline you need before exit diligence.

Alternatively, if you’re based in the US, PADISO’s CTO Advisory in Houston or Dallas can provide the same service.

Engineering Hiring & Retention

Buyers will scrutinise your engineering team. They’ll ask: How many engineers do you have? What’s your retention rate? What’s your hiring pipeline?

If you have high turnover (>20% per year) or a weak pipeline, that’s a risk. Buyers assume they’ll lose 10–20% of the engineering team in the first 12 months post-acquisition due to non-competes, relocation, and integration friction. If you’re already losing people, that compounds the risk.

Action: Build an engineering talent plan:

1. Retention: Identify your top 10 engineers. What’s keeping them? (Compensation, equity, technical challenge, culture?) Make sure they’re locked in with retention bonuses or equity grants through the exit.

2. Hiring: What’s your 12-month hiring plan? If you need 5 more engineers to execute your modernisation roadmap, start recruiting now. Hiring engineers takes 3–4 months; you can’t compress it.

3. Skill gaps: Do you have data engineers? ML engineers? Platform engineers? These are increasingly critical. If you’re short, start hiring or upskilling.

4. Onboarding: Do you have a documented onboarding process? Can a new engineer be productive in 2 weeks? Buyers will want to onboard their own people post-acquisition; if your onboarding is chaotic, that’s a friction point.

Action: Engage a fractional CTO to help with hiring and onboarding. They can also help you build a technical interview process, define role expectations, and create a career ladder for engineers. This is valuable for retention and for signalling to buyers that you take engineering seriously.

Organisational Scalability & Process Documentation

Buyers will ask: Can this business scale? They’ll look at your organisational structure, processes, and systems.

If everything is ad-hoc and dependent on key people, that’s a red flag. If you have documented processes, clear roles, and systems that enforce consistency, that’s green.

Action: Document your critical processes:

1. Sales process: How do you qualify leads, build proposals, and close deals? Is it repeatable? Can you train a new salesperson to follow the process?

2. Delivery process: How do you staff projects, manage scope, and deliver on time? Do you have a project-management methodology (Agile, Waterfall, hybrid)? Can you replicate it across teams?

3. Financial process: How do you forecast revenue, manage costs, and close the books? Is it manual or automated? Can you close in <5 days?

4. Safety & compliance process: How do you ensure safety on site? How do you manage certifications, audits, and regulatory requirements? Is it centralised or decentralised?

5. Hiring & onboarding process: How do you recruit, interview, and onboard new staff? Is there a standard playbook?

For each process, create a 1–2 page document: What is the process? Who owns it? What systems support it? What metrics do we track?

Buyers will spend a day with your operations team walking through these processes. If you can articulate them clearly, you signal operational maturity. If you can’t, you signal chaos.

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Market Position & Competitive Benchmarking {#market-position}

Customer Segments & Market Positioning

Buyers will ask: Who are your customers? What’s your market position?

Mining services is fragmented. You might be a drilling contractor, an engineering firm, a safety consultant, or a logistics provider. Your positioning determines your valuation multiple.

Positioning questions:

1. Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 vs. Tier 3 customers: Tier 1 customers are the largest miners (BHP, Rio Tinto, Glencore, Newmont). Tier 2 are mid-tier miners. Tier 3 are junior explorers and small-cap operators. Tier 1 customers pay more, have longer contracts, and are stickier. If 80% of your revenue is Tier 3, that’s riskier than 80% Tier 1.

2. Service type: Are you a commodity services provider (drilling, earthmoving, logistics) competing on price? Or a specialised services provider (engineering design, safety consulting, data analytics) competing on expertise? Specialised services command higher multiples.

3. Geography: Are you concentrated in one region (e.g., Western Australia) or diversified across multiple regions/countries? Concentration is a risk; diversification is a strength.

4. Stickiness: How sticky are your customer relationships? If a customer can replace you with a phone call, you’re a commodity. If they’re dependent on your systems, people, and processes, you’re sticky.

Action: Build a customer segmentation matrix. Plot each customer by tier, service type, geography, and stickiness. Identify your strongest segments. Then, build a 3-year growth plan that shifts revenue toward higher-value segments (Tier 1, specialised services, sticky relationships).

Buyers want to see that you’re not just a commodity services provider, but that you’re moving up the value chain.

Competitive Benchmarking & Differentiation

Buyers will compare you to competitors. They’ll ask: How do you differentiate? Why should a customer choose you over a competitor?

Your answer can’t be “We’re cheaper” or “We have good people.” Those are table stakes. You need a defensible differentiation story.

Examples:

• Technology: “We have a proprietary platform that integrates with customer SCADA systems, giving them real-time visibility into project health and equipment utilisation. Competitors require manual data entry.”

• Safety: “We have a 5-year safety record with zero lost-time injuries, vs. industry average of 2–3 per 100 FTE. We use predictive analytics to identify high-risk activities before incidents occur.”

• Specialisation: “We’re the only provider with expertise in deep-sea mining operations. We’ve delivered 8 projects in the Clarion Clipperton Zone; competitors have 0.”

• Efficiency: “We’ve automated 40% of our resource scheduling, reducing project lead times by 30% and improving utilisation by 8%. Competitors are still using spreadsheets.”

Action: Define your top 3 differentiation stories. For each, document:

• What’s the differentiation? (Technology, safety, specialisation, efficiency, etc.)
• How defensible is it? (Can competitors replicate it in 6 months or 2 years?)
• What’s the customer impact? (Cost savings, revenue uplift, risk reduction?)
• What’s the evidence? (Customer testimonials, case studies, third-party validation?)

Buyers want to see that you have a defensible moat, not just a temporary advantage.

Customer References & Case Studies

Buyers will call your customers. They’ll ask: “Why do you use this provider? Would you recommend them? What’s the risk of losing them post-acquisition?”

This is where case studies and customer references are critical.

Action: Build 3–5 detailed case studies. For each, document:

• Customer name and profile: Size, industry, location, how long they’ve been a customer.
• Challenge: What problem did they face?
• Solution: What did you deliver?
• Impact: What was the quantified outcome? (Cost savings, time reduction, safety improvement, revenue uplift?)
• Testimonial: A quote from the customer (ideally the CFO, COO, or head of operations).

Example:

Customer: Rio Tinto, Pilbara Iron Ore Division (Tier 1, 8-year customer) Challenge: Manual resource scheduling was taking 40 hours per week and causing project delays. Solution: Deployed our proprietary scheduling platform integrated with their project-management system. Impact: Reduced scheduling time by 30 hours per week (75% reduction), improved utilisation by 8%, eliminated 3 project delays per quarter. Testimonial: “[Company] didn’t just provide a service; they fundamentally changed how we plan our operations. The scheduling platform is now mission-critical.” — Rio Tinto Operations Manager

Buyers will use these case studies to validate your value proposition and to de-risk the post-acquisition integration. Strong case studies can add 1–2 turns to your valuation multiple.

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Exit Positioning & Buyer Narratives {#exit-positioning}

Building Your Exit Story

Buyers don’t just buy a business; they buy a story. Your exit story should answer three questions:

1. What have you built? (A description of your business, market position, and track record.)
2. Why is now the right time to sell? (Market conditions, competitive dynamics, founder/investor priorities.)
3. What’s the value creation opportunity? (What can the buyer do with your business that you can’t do alone?)

Action: Develop a 1-page exit narrative. Example:

The Opportunity: We’ve built a $50M revenue mining services company with strong customer relationships (60% Tier 1 customers), recurring revenue (70% contracted), and expanding margins (22% EBITDA). Our proprietary scheduling platform and safety analytics are defensible differentiators.

Why Now: The mining sector is entering a capex upcycle (lithium, rare earths, deep-sea mining). Tier 1 customers are increasing project activity by 30–50% YoY. We have the relationships to capture this growth, but we’re capital-constrained and lack the scale to invest in technology and geographic expansion simultaneously.

Value Creation: A strategic buyer can (1) consolidate our scheduling platform across a larger portfolio, (2) expand our services into adjacent geographies, (3) cross-sell our platform to their existing customer base, (4) leverage our safety analytics to reduce insurance costs across the group. We estimate $100M+ in revenue uplift and 300+ bps of margin expansion over 3 years.

This narrative positions you as a strategic asset, not a commodity acquisition. It gives buyers a roadmap for value creation.

Buyer Personas & Positioning Variations

Different buyers will have different priorities. Tailor your narrative accordingly.

Strategic Buyer (Large Mining Company)

Priorities: Operational efficiency, cost reduction, safety, technology adoption.

Your narrative: “We’ve built a platform that reduces your operating costs by 5–8% and improves safety outcomes. We can be deployed across your portfolio in 12 months.”

PE Buyer (Infrastructure or Services Fund)

Priorities: Revenue growth, margin expansion, acquisition targets, exit multiple.

Your narrative: “We’re a platform for consolidation. Our scheduling and safety analytics can be deployed across 5–10 add-on acquisitions, creating a $200M+ revenue platform with 25%+ EBITDA margins and a 10x exit multiple.”

Consolidator (Larger Services Provider)

Priorities: Market share, customer base, eliminating redundancy, cross-selling.

Your narrative: “We bring 30 Tier 1 customers and a $50M revenue base that can be integrated into your platform with minimal redundancy. Our scheduling system can replace your legacy system across the combined company, saving $2M per year.”

Action: Develop buyer personas. For each, write a 1-page positioning narrative tailored to their priorities. Your investment banker or M&A advisor should help with this.

Financial Projections & Valuation Narrative

Buyers will model your business. They’ll project 3–5 years of revenue, EBITDA, and cash flow. They’ll apply a multiple (typically 8–12x EBITDA for mining services) and compare to your asking price.

Your job is to make your projections credible and compelling.

Action: Build a 5-year financial model:

1. Revenue: Project by customer segment, service type, and geography. Show growth drivers (customer expansion, new customers, price increases, service mix shift). Be conservative but credible. 10–15% annual growth is typical for mining services; 20%+ requires strong justification.

2. EBITDA margin: Project by service type and scale. Show how automation, platform scaling, and operational efficiency will expand margins. Start with historical margins; show a credible path to +300–500 bps expansion over 5 years.

3. Working capital: Mining services often have long payment cycles (60–90 days). Model the working capital impact of growth.

4. Capex: What capex is required to support growth? (Technology, equipment, facilities?) Typically 2–4% of revenue for services companies.

5. Valuation: Apply a multiple (8–12x EBITDA, depending on risk profile) to your Year 3 EBITDA. Show the buyer’s potential exit multiple and IRR.

Example:

Year	Revenue	EBITDA	EBITDA Margin	Exit Multiple	Enterprise Value
2024	$50M	$11M	22%	—	—
2025	$57M	$14M	25%	—	—
2026	$66M	$18M	27%	10x	$180M
2027	$77M	$23M	30%	11x	$253M
2028	$90M	$29M	32%	12x	$348M

This model shows a buyer that they can acquire you for $150M, grow you to $90M revenue with 32% EBITDA margins, and exit at $350M in 5 years—a 2.3x return.

Buyers will stress-test these projections. They’ll ask: “What if revenue grows at 5% instead of 14%? What if margins only expand to 25%?” Be prepared with downside and upside scenarios.

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Execution Timeline & Quick Wins {#execution-timeline}

90-Day Sprint (Immediate Wins)

If you’re planning to exit in 12–18 months, start now. Here’s a 90-day sprint:

Month 1: Diligence Prep

• Audit your financials. Engage a Big 4 firm if you haven’t already.
• Build your customer concentration scorecard. Identify concentration risks.
• Conduct a technology inventory. List every system, cost, and owner.
• Assess your security posture. Use Vanta or a similar tool to identify compliance gaps.

Month 2: Narrative Development

• Develop your exit narrative and buyer personas.
• Build 3–5 case studies with customer testimonials.
• Create your financial model (5-year projections).
• Hire a fractional CTO (if you don’t have one) to validate your technology strategy.

Month 3: Quick Wins

• Launch one automation pilot (proposal generation, safety analysis, or resource scheduling).
• Start hiring for critical engineering roles.
• Document your top 5 operational processes.
• Begin customer retention planning (especially for top 10 customers).

Output: By end of Q1, you have audited financials, a credible exit narrative, a financial model, and the beginning of an automation story. You’re ready for banker conversations.

6-Month Roadmap (Value Creation)

Months 4–6: Modernisation & Automation

• Complete your first automation pilot. Document results.
• Launch your second automation pilot.
• Build a data warehouse. Ingest data from your core systems.
• Complete your SOC 2 gap assessment. Begin remediation.
• Hire 2–3 engineers for your technology roadmap.

Months 7–9: Scaling & Consolidation

• Complete your second automation pilot. Start planning third.
• Go live with your data warehouse. Begin analytics.
• Achieve SOC 2 audit readiness (or Type II certification if timing allows).
• Hire your fractional CTO full-time or promote an internal engineer to CTO.
• Complete your organisational documentation (processes, roles, KPIs).

Months 10–12: Positioning & Readiness

• Refresh your financial model with 6 months of actual results.
• Update your case studies with new automation results.
• Conduct a full exit readiness audit (financials, technology, security, operations).
• Engage an investment banker. Begin buyer conversations.

Output: By end of Q3, you have a modernised technology stack, automation pilots delivering measurable ROI, SOC 2 readiness, and a credible growth narrative. You’re positioned for a premium valuation.

Key Milestones & Success Metrics

Track these metrics monthly:

Metric	Target	Owner
Customer concentration (top customer % of revenue)	<15%	CEO/COO
Revenue visibility (% of next 12 months contracted)	>50%	VP Sales
EBITDA margin	+200–300 bps YoY	CFO
Engineering headcount	+3–5 FTE	CTO
Automation pilots launched	2–3	CTO
SOC 2 audit readiness	80%+ by month 6	COO/CTO
Customer NPS (Net Promoter Score)	>50	VP Customer Success
Employee retention (engineering)	>90%	CHRO

Review these metrics monthly with your executive team. Use them to track progress and adjust priorities.

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Summary & Next Steps {#summary}

Exit readiness for mining services portfolio companies is not a checklist you complete 2 months before sale. It’s a 12–18 month journey of operational improvement, technology modernisation, and narrative development.

Here’s what you need to do:

Immediate (Next 30 Days)

1. Engage an investment banker or M&A advisor. You need expert guidance on buyer personas, valuation benchmarks, and deal structure. Budget $100K–$300K in fees (typically 1–2% of deal value).

2. Assess your financial readiness. Engage a Big 4 auditor to review your financials. Budget $50K–$150K.

3. Hire a fractional CTO (if you don’t have one). This is your most important hire for exit readiness. Consider PADISO’s Fractional CTO services available across Australia and the US.

4. Build your exit narrative. Work with your banker and CTO to develop a compelling story for buyers.

3–6 Months

1. Modernise your technology stack. Retire legacy systems. Build data integration. Start automation pilots.

2. Achieve SOC 2 audit readiness. Use PADISO’s Security Audit service or a similar provider to close compliance gaps.

3. Document your operations. Create process documentation, organisational charts, and KPI dashboards.

4. Expand your engineering team. Hire or upskill engineers for your modernisation roadmap.

5. Build customer case studies. Develop 3–5 detailed case studies with quantified outcomes.

6–12 Months

1. Execute your automation roadmap. Launch 2–3 automation pilots. Document ROI.

2. Refresh your financial model. Incorporate 6 months of actual results. Update buyer narratives.

3. Achieve SOC 2 Type II certification (if possible). Or be audit-ready.

4. Conduct a full exit readiness audit. Work with your banker to identify remaining gaps.

5. Begin buyer conversations. Your banker should be running a process with 10–15 potential buyers (strategic, PE, consolidators).

12–18 Months

1. Negotiate and close. Your banker will manage the process. You’ll focus on due diligence support and buyer relationship building.

2. Plan the transition. Work with the buyer on integration planning, retention agreements, and post-close responsibilities.

3. Celebrate and reflect. You’ve built a valuable business. You’ve earned the exit.

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Final Thoughts

Mining services is a capital-intensive, relationship-driven sector. Buyers understand this. They’re not expecting you to be a tech startup. But they are expecting operational maturity, clean financials, a credible technology strategy, and a path to scale.

If you can deliver on these four fronts, you’ll command a premium valuation. If you can’t, you’ll be competing on price.

The good news: You have 12–18 months to get this right. That’s enough time to modernise your technology, automate key processes, achieve compliance, and build a compelling exit narrative.

Start today. Engage your banker, hire your CTO, and begin the journey. Your future acquirer will thank you.

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Ready to accelerate your exit readiness?

PADISO partners with mining services portfolio companies on technology modernisation, AI automation, and exit positioning. Our Fractional CTO service provides the technical leadership you need. Our Platform Development service builds the data and automation infrastructure that buyers value. Our Security Audit service gets you SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audit-ready in weeks, not months.

Based in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and across Australia (plus Houston, Dallas, Denver, New York), we understand mining services, METS, and resources companies. We’ve helped portfolio companies across Australia and the US prepare for exit, accelerate growth, and unlock value.

Book a call with our team to discuss your exit readiness journey. Let’s build a credible technology story and a premium exit narrative together.