You spent a lifetime building it. The sale should be run to the standard the industry measures itself against.
Cordis Global advises founder-owned and family-owned companies, from $5M to $250M in revenue, across the whole arc of a transaction: the years of preparation before it, the deal itself, and the decades after the wire.
Maybe it is a new technology. More often it is the thing nobody notices. The fasteners that hold a bridge together. The parts that keep a plant running. The service a town depends on and never thinks about. You made payroll through the years that were not easy. You are the reason families have a livelihood and a community has a center.
That is not a small thing. To the people whose lives it shaped, it is the thing.
When it comes time to realize what you built, the number should carry the magnitude of it. Making sure it does, so that you and your family thrive in what comes next, is the work we do.
Founder-owned and family-held, from $5M to $250M in revenue. The businesses that quietly keep a region working, and the families behind them.
A transition gets described in numbers, because numbers are the part that can be stated plainly. What those numbers stand for is what decides whether the outcome was a good one, and establishing it together is where the work starts.
Every firm in this market can model a company. We start with the person who built it, because the people are the work.
A corporate development team, standing documents, and counsel who does nothing else.
They are not unsophisticated. They have never done this before, and they will not do it again.
The people who will price your company spent their careers on the other side of this table: Wall Street, private equity, and exit planning inside one of the largest wealth managers in the world. We know the model a buyer runs before the first meeting, the question their accountant asks on day forty, and the retrade that arrives after the letter of intent. Not because we studied it. Because we were the ones doing it.
The other side has done this many times. A transaction happens to you once, and it does not wait for a second attempt.
The rigor is table stakes. Institutional underwriting, diligence built to survive the room, negotiation engineered to the terms, brought to the lower middle market. It is the price of being in the room, not what sets us apart.
The difference begins underneath it. Every decision reaches a family, a workforce and a community before it reaches a balance sheet. That is the part the other side never has to understand, and the part we are built on.
Most of what an owner keeps is decided before the market, defended in the deal, and protected long after the wire.
Value is built before a transaction, proven during it, and protected after. The grey arc is the only phase a transaction advisor is engaged for, and most of what an owner keeps is decided outside it.
Each engagement is scoped in writing, carries a named partner, and ends on a date. Readiness stands on its own, and leads to a mandate only when the numbers say it should.
What each buyer lane would pay today, what the gap is worth, and the sequence that closes it.
Four stages, weighted to preparation. The first two complete before the market hears anything.
A thesis, a proprietary search into companies that are not listed, and a fee fixed before the first approach.
Seller notes, earnouts, escrow, and the planning the proceeds now have to carry.
Before any process begins, the owner's own file is run through the underwriting model of every buyer lane ten thousand times, returning the whole distribution rather than a single number. The floor is the number we defend, and the number below which the client walks.
The owner's own file, run through the underwriting model of every buyer lane ten thousand times. Peer-reviewed research, dated and published. A quantitative, AI-native method that until now lived upstairs, reserved for companies from $50 million to the multi-billions, the ones with a corporate development team and a bank on retainer. We brought it down to the businesses that hold up a town, and we brought it first.
Not every fix is worth making before you sell. Which gaps to close, for which buyer, and which to leave alone.
The frameworks the firm is built on, published under institutional byline, each one dated, numbered and open to challenge. The Institute writes in public so the work can be argued with.
Read the researchNot every owner is ready for a mandate, and not every question needs one. The same framework the firm runs on is published as the Off-Market Method: a book, a workbook and a program, so an owner can start with the thinking in their own hands. The same standard, a door that opens sooner.
Cordis is Latin for "of the heart." The name was chosen before the first mandate.
Our founder grew up inside a family HVAC business, where the people who ran it, the families who depended on it, and the town it served were never separate things. A decision made at a desk reached all three by the end of the week. That is the order the firm still works in. Establish what the numbers are protecting, then design the structure that protects it.
The approachAn owner who prepared walks in with clarity, is met at full value, and leaves with the proceeds protected and the decision made on their own terms. Not relief that it is over. Confidence about what follows.
A mandate, a study, or the name of somebody better suited. We take a mandate only where we can materially improve the outcome, and finding out costs nothing.