Revamp your divestiture process

A divestiture is the sale, closure or spin-off of a business unit, subsidiary, product line or asset by its parent company. Companies divest to refocus on core operations, raise capital, satisfy regulators after a merger or shed an underperforming unit. The process runs from strategy review through deal marketing, buyer diligence and signing to the separation of people, contracts and systems. DealRoom gives the seller one place to prepare the unit, run buyer diligence and manage the separation.

Divestiture is the umbrella term for a parent company disposing of part of its business. A carve-out sells a business unit to a third party; an equity carve-out instead sells a minority stake through an IPO while the parent keeps control. A spin-off distributes shares in the new entity to the parent's existing shareholders, so no buyer is involved. Carve-outs to a buyer involve the most diligence and separation work, which is the process DealRoom's divestiture software is built around.

Divestiture software gives a seller one system to prepare a business unit for sale, collect and organize its documents, answer buyer diligence requests and manage the separation after signing. DealRoom combines a virtual data room with request-based diligence management: buyers leave requests, review documents and collaborate in comments inside the room, while the seller's team controls what each party sees with granular permissions. An analytics tab and a detailed audit log show request, document and user activity as the process runs.

Give each buyer group its own permission group and control which data room folders, worklists and requests it can see. In DealRoom, users are invited into permission groups with folder-level access. A "view as" function shows exactly what a given bidder sees before anything is released. Internal comments can be scoped to a group so discussion never reaches a buyer. Findings sit behind a separate permission. The audit log records who viewed or uploaded each document.

Yes, in the same project room used for buyer diligence. Separation tasks and transition services agreement obligations can be logged as worklist items with an owner, status, priority and due date. Dependencies mark which items are blocked by or blocking others, a Gantt timeline view shows the plan and dynamic dates set relative to a milestone such as close date re-plan the workstream when that date moves. Status rolls up into BI Reporting, so the divestiture team sees progress in real time.

Yes. DealRoom's analytics tab reports request, document and user activity by user, so the deal team can see which potential buyers are opening documents, answering requests and asking questions. Combined with the detailed audit log of every upload and view, this helps the seller judge buyer interest, prioritize follow-up and anticipate where the process is likely to land. Reports can also be scheduled by email to internal recipients on a set cadence.

The four main types of divestiture are a sale to a buyer (including a carve-out of a unit), a spin-off that distributes shares of the unit to existing shareholders, a split-off where shareholders exchange parent shares for shares in the unit and an equity carve-out that sells a minority stake through an IPO. Each type needs the same groundwork: a clean data room, a separation task list and clear control over which buyers or advisors see which documents, which is what DealRoom provides in one project room.