Cordis Group · Principal-First Advisory
Cordis exists for the moment before
Of LMM deals repriced after the LOI
73%
Cordis Institute WP-001
Of private deals carry a price adjustment
92%
SRS Acquiom, 2026
The asymmetry
Diligence is not a confirmation process. It is a discounting process.
Paid per earnout dollar promised
21¢
SRS Acquiom, 2025
Cordis is an M&A advisory and intelligence firm. We help founders and family-owned businesses transfer ownership: externally, across every buyer type from strategic acquirers and private equity to family offices, search funds, and independent sponsors, and internally across generations. We also run select buy-side searches for companies looking to acquire, merge, or expand through tuck-in transactions. Our most consequential work happens before any of that begins, bringing the same institutional intelligence that the most sophisticated buyers use in transactions to the seller's side of the table, so every principal knows exactly what a buyer will see, think, and do before they do it.
Before the process
SENTRY runs 50,000+ simulated outcomes per buyer lane against real closed transaction data. Every variable stress-tested. Every risk quantified. The result is not a number. It is the full picture a buyer already has, produced for the founder before any process begins.
Explore the MRI →During the process
For founders who are ready to transact, Cordis runs the process (buyer identification, negotiation, diligence coordination, and structure analysis) with one agenda. The founder's outcome. Not the fee. Not the close. The outcome.
Explore Mandates →From Off-Market
The Map shows where a buyer looks first. The Cordis MRI shows what each buyer type would do with your real numbers, and ranks every fix by what it protects. Fixed fee, quoted by revenue band. Every dollar spent on the Buyer-Ready Kit is credited toward it.
The Misalignment Tax is the gap between what a prepared founder receives and what an unprepared founder accepts. It is not caused by a bad market, a difficult negotiation, or an unfair buyer. It accumulates in the months before any buyer sees your books, in every decision made without knowing what the buyer would find, what they would use, and what they were already planning to subtract.
Every buyer who makes a serious offer has already run a model against your business. That model identifies every place where what you believe the business is worth diverges from what they can justify paying. It exists specifically to close that gap in their favor.
The Misalignment Tax™ defined
The discount a founder accepts when their business is optimized for one buyer type but sold to another. Or when preparation is organized around the founder's narrative rather than the buyer's model. It is invisible until the LOI comes back revised. By then there is nothing left to do about it.
73%
Of LMM deals repriced after the LOI. Cordis Institute WP-001
18%
Average size of that price cut, as a share of enterprise value. Cordis Institute WP-001
92%
Of private-company deals include a purchase price adjustment. SRS Acquiom 2026
21¢
Paid per earnout dollar promised, counting earnouts that pay nothing. SRS Acquiom 2025
Your Situation
Read the four situations below. Find the one that reflects where you are right now. What sits behind it will tell you what is at stake.
Read what sits behind each one →01
Planning Ahead
Whether it is two years away or ten, you are building with the end in mind. The question is whether you are building toward the right one.
See what is running →02
Decided Founder
The business is going to market. You feel more prepared than most founders who have gone through this. You may be right.
See what is running →03
Legacy Owner
Whether it passes to family or transfers to a partner, what you built deserves to transfer at its full value. Most do not.
See what is running →04
Not Yet
The business runs. That is enough. An exit feels abstract, distant, or simply not relevant right now.
See what is running →Three of these four positions have something at stake right now. Which one are you in?
Find Your SituationThe Name
Latin. Of the heart.
It was chosen deliberately. Not as sentiment. As a reminder.
Behind every engagement Cordis runs is a business that took decades to build. Behind every business is a family that depends on it. An owner who built something from nothing, or inherited something and made it better. Employees who count on it for their mortgage, their children's education, their sense of stability. Communities where the business is one of the largest employers, one of the oldest institutions, one of the things that makes the place what it is.
The precision matters. The analytics are real. The simulations run into the hundreds of thousands for a reason. Every variable modeled, every risk quantified, every buyer lane mapped. All of it exists because the stakes are that high.
But SENTRY does not know that the founder's father started the company in 1987. It does not know that the business employs 340 people in a town of 8,000. It does not know that the founder has been awake at 3am for six months trying to figure out how to take care of everyone who took care of her.
Cordis does.
The name is a reminder of what the numbers are for. They are not for the transaction. They are for the people the transaction will either protect or fail.
That is what it means to be principal-first.
From the Field
Every founder on this list was running their business well. None of them knew that the decisions they were making today were being read by a buyer they had not met yet. A small course correction, made early, protected or unlocked an outcome they did not know was at risk.
Read all six engagements →01
Professional Services
$15M Revenue · CPA Practice
An expansion that looked right from the inside was restructuring his revenue in a way a buyer would read as risk. He did not change what he built. He changed how it would be read.
Read the engagement →02
Healthcare Services
$40M Enterprise Value · Medical Group
A fourth location made operational sense. Which buyer universe it belonged to had never been mapped. The same decision reads completely differently depending on who is eventually sitting across the table.
Read the engagement →03
Consumer Packaged Goods
$28M Revenue · CPG Brand
She was reinvesting aggressively. Every dollar looked right from an operator's perspective. Two of them were being spent toward a buyer lane that was not the highest-probability acquirer for what she had built.
Read the engagement →04
Facilities & Maintenance
$18M Revenue · Commercial Services
Twenty-two years. Not going anywhere. Then one question: if something happened to him tomorrow, could she sell this business for what it was actually worth?
Read the engagement →05
B2B Software
$12M ARR · Vertical SaaS
Low churn, strong retention, 28% growth. Every decision made on operating logic. None of them run against a transaction model.
Read the engagement →06
Multi-Owner Family Enterprise
$125M Enterprise Value · Family Business
Thirty-one years. Two generations. The estate documents had not been updated since the business was worth $30M. The structure was narrowing the family's options with every month that passed.
Read the engagement →Facilities & Maintenance · $18M Revenue
He was not thinking about selling. His wife asked a question that changed that.
Twenty-two years in business. No intention of selling. Then one question from his wife: if something happened to him tomorrow, could she sell this business for what it was actually worth? SENTRY identified $2.1M in proceeds at risk from three documented risk vectors, none of which required changing the business. Only how it would be read.
Read the engagement →B2B Software · $12M ARR · Vertical SaaS
He was making the right decisions. In an order that was quietly costing him.
Low churn. Strong retention. 28% growth. Every decision made on sound operating logic. None of them run against a transaction model. The sequencing was locking him out of the buyer lanes paying the highest multiples, not because of what he built, but because of the order he built it in.
Read the engagement →A redacted version of any engagement is available. We walk qualified principals and advisors through it personally.
See All Six EngagementsCordis is not the next version of the firms that came before it. It is a different model entirely. Built so that the only agenda in the room is yours.
Cordis is paid only by the principals it serves, on terms agreed before the work begins. Every piece of guidance serves one outcome. Yours.
The most consequential decisions do not require more data. They require the right data, organized around what actually matters. Cordis produces intelligence, not reports. Clarity, not volume.
In complex, high-stakes processes, the center of gravity drifts. Toward the institution. Toward the deal. Toward what is easiest. Cordis exists to hold the line. Every decision returns to the principal.
Why Cordis
Cordis sits at the intersection of intelligence, alignment, and discretion. Not because it evolved there. Because it was built there. Every engagement, every mandate, every piece of intelligence produced by SENTRY exists to serve one outcome. The principal's.
Financial, legal, operational, and family considerations treated as one interconnected system. Not separate conversations the principal is left to coordinate alone.
One agenda and one set of incentives: the principal’s. Cordis is built to sit solely on the principal's side of the table. That is not a positioning claim. It is a structural fact.
50,000 simulations. 17 underwriting variables. Real closed transaction data. Evidence behind every recommendation, not instinct dressed as expertise.
The MRI is the entry point. EVO Alliance, The Institute, The Endowment. Cordis is not a firm that appears for a deal and disappears. It was built to be permanent.
The Founder
Decisions around growth, capital, ownership, and exit are expected to be rational. For those accountable for them, they rarely feel that way, they're personal, and the consequences last.
Read moreGlobal Presence
City references are generalized to preserve client confidentiality.
Begin
That is what Cordis produces. Before the offer. Before the process. Before the conversation you did not know was coming.
Not tied to a transaction mandate. Not a listing agreement. Not a success fee.
The analysis is yours to keep and act on with any advisor, on any timeline.