Families, employees, and a whole community depend on it.
When it's time for your next chapter, you deserve an experienced team on your side of the table.
Founder-owned and family-held, from $5M to $250M in revenue. The businesses that quietly keep a region working, and the families behind them.
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.

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.
See the Cordis MRI
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 researchDeliberately small and senior. There is no junior team the client never meets, and no handoff from the pitch to the people who do the work.
Grew up inside the family HVAC business, then Wall Street capital formation and exit planning at AllianceBernstein. Head of Research at the Cordis Institute.
Full profile & Q&A →Nearly a decade on Wall Street, close to capital formation, then businesses of his own. He advises founders and families through growth, capital and ownership transitions.
Full profile & Q&A →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.