The M&A Accretion/Dilution Model Every Founder and Investor Should Run Before Any Deal
One question drives every acquisition: does this make earnings per share go up or down? Here's the model that answers it.
There’s a moment in every acquisition conversation where someone mentions accretion or dilution and half the room nods along without fully understanding what it means.
Most people never model this themselves. They stay dependent on bankers and advisors to tell them whether a deal is good or bad.
That’s an expensive way to make decisions worth tens of millions of dollars.
The accretion/dilution analysis answers one specific question: after this deal closes, does the acquiring company’s earnings per share go up or down?
If EPS goes up, the deal is accretive. If it goes down, it’s dilutive. The complexity lives in the variables feeding into it: the offer price, the financing structure, the synergies, the integration costs, the mix of cash and stock.
Most people in the room have never run this. The ones who have are asking the right questions and getting better terms because of it.
This seven-sheet Excel model covering the full accretion/dilution analysis for any M&A deal. Pre-loaded with a worked example so you can see exactly how it functions before you swap in your own numbers.
It handles everything from purchase price and financing structure through to a live EPS verdict, break-even synergy calculation, offer price scaling across 11 price points, and four two-way sensitivity tables stress-testing offer price against cash mix and synergies.
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The complete working guide around it, plus the full VC Corner resource library.
Inside the premium section:
7-sheet Excel model covering the full accretion/dilution analysis for any M&A deal
Sheet-by-sheet walkthrough of every section in the model, including exactly which cells to edit, what the outputs mean, and where most people make mistakes the first time they run this
How to use the sensitivity tables to structure a negotiation and present a defensible price range to a board
When a dilutive deal is still the right decision -- the three scenarios where short-term EPS dilution is the correct trade
The questions to ask when someone else presents this analysis to you, so you stop nodding along and start pressure-testing the assumptions that actually drive the verdict
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