The Cordis Endowment is a permanent, funded commitment from the firm to the structural conditions that surround every transaction we advise on. The commercial practice and the philanthropic commitment are expressions of the same belief. They grow together.
The founders who built something real deserve to exit it on informed terms.
When a founder sells a business, the consequences extend far beyond the closing table. They touch the families who built equity alongside them, the employees whose livelihoods were shaped by that enterprise, and the communities whose tax base and institutional memory are embedded in what that business represented.
Cordis was built on the observation that information asymmetry in private markets is not a neutral condition. It is a structural bias that consistently transfers value away from founders and toward buyers who arrive better prepared. The MRI engagement corrects that asymmetry for individual clients. The Endowment funds the work that addresses it at scale.
Every engagement Cordis closes sharpens the research the Endowment funds. Every piece of research the Endowment produces makes the next engagement more precise. The architecture is intentional.
The information asymmetry in private markets is a correctable problem. Correcting it is worth doing — not because it is good for Cordis, but because the founders who built something real deserve to exit it on informed terms. The Endowment exists because that belief has consequences that extend beyond any single engagement.
The lower-middle market is the least studied segment of private transactions in the United States. Academic M&A research concentrates where data is visible — public companies, large-cap PE, disclosed transactions above $250 million. The $5M to $250M founder-owned business market operates almost entirely out of view.
The data that does exist is fragmentary and buyer-side. SRS Acquiom, GF Data, PitchBook — valuable, but none answer the question a seller actually needs answered: what happened to businesses whose profile looks like mine, and why?
Between 40 and 60 percent of signed LOIs in the lower-middle market are repriced before close. In 8 out of 10 repriced transactions, the seller had access to the same information the buyer used to renegotiate. They simply had not organized it before the process began.
The advisory community has no protocol for cognitive decline in business ownership. The Endowment funds the research that builds one — and the frameworks that allow preparation before the moment of crisis.
When a business closes — not sells, but closes — the consequences are rarely contained to the owner. A manufacturer in a mid-sized city is forty jobs, a customer to a dozen local suppliers, a contributor to the municipal tax base, and in many communities the institutional anchor that everything else organizes around.
McKinsey's 2025 analysis found that nearly 80% of projected ownership exits will occur among businesses valued below $2 million — the firms most likely to close rather than transfer, because they lack access to buyers, advisors, and financing. In smaller, aging states, firm closures permanently break local economic ladders. The value at stake exceeds $3 trillion.
The Five Ds account for roughly 50% of all business exits. More than half of owners rarely think about protection against these risks. Only 40% have a buy-sell agreement. Of those, most have not reviewed it in five years — and most do not address disability, despite the fact that the odds of a long-term disabling illness before age 65 are measurably greater than the odds of dying prematurely.
Only 30% of family businesses make it to the second generation. Only 12% survive to the third. The Endowment funds work that changes those odds — at the enterprise and community level.
Institutional buyers train their deal teams extensively. They run post-mortems on every completed transaction. They maintain internal playbooks documenting which variables move purchase price, which diligence findings create the most negotiating leverage, and which structural terms — earnouts, escrow holdbacks, working capital pegs — convert guaranteed consideration into contingent payment.
The founder across the table is navigating this for the first and only time. Their attorney may have done a handful of transactions at this size. Their CPA may have never been present at a closing table. The informational asymmetry does not begin at the LOI. It begins years before, in the absence of any infrastructure that transmits transaction intelligence to founders before they need it.
The goal of the Education domain is not to create Cordis clients. It is that the framework for understanding what is at stake in a lower-middle-market transaction becomes common knowledge among the advisors who serve founders — so that a founder who never engages Cordis still enters their process better prepared.
SCORE has helped more than 17 million entrepreneurs since 1964. Its research shows that business owners who receive three or more hours of mentoring report higher revenues and faster growth. But SCORE's transaction-specific resources do not yet address the informational asymmetry that governs lower-middle-market deal outcomes. The Endowment funds work that closes that gap.
Two distinct access problems define the edges of the Cordis mission. The first is at the exit end: founders navigating transactions without institutional-grade advisory support — not because they are indifferent, but because the infrastructure simply does not exist in the markets where they operate.
The second is at the formation end: people who would build the businesses that eventually become Cordis clients, if the structural barriers to formation were lower. The most consequential of those barriers in the United States is health insurance.
The academic literature has documented a phenomenon called entrepreneurship lock — the suppression of business formation caused by the bundling of health insurance and employment. Research published in the Journal of Health Economics found that business ownership rates increase measurably in the months immediately after individuals turn 65 — when Medicare removes the health insurance dependency. The jump at age 65 is specifically attributable to the removal of the coverage barrier, not retirement or pension eligibility.
A 2024 study in Small Business Economics found that a $100 per month increase in health insurance exchange premiums decreases the annual probability of entry into self-employment by 18%. Published research in PMC found that self-employed females are 83% less likely to be insured than women in the general population. The Endowment takes the gendered dimension of this specifically seriously.
The Cordis Endowment is funded directly from firm revenue. It is not a marketing vehicle, a client relations program, or a line item that competes with operating expenses. It is a first-party financial commitment to the belief that built the firm — that the information asymmetry in private markets is a correctable problem, and that correcting it matters beyond the principals who pay to have it corrected individually.
The capital committed to the Endowment grows as the firm grows. This is deliberate. A stronger Endowment produces more independent research. More independent research produces a more precise SENTRY model. A more precise model produces better outcomes for clients. Better outcomes produce more revenue. More revenue produces a stronger Endowment. The cycle is intentional and it is permanent.
The Endowment is governed with the same discipline Cordis brings to every engagement: defined domains, measurable outcomes, and a commitment to publishing what is found regardless of what it shows. There is no donor relations function. The work is quiet, long-horizon, and evaluated on whether it moves the structural conditions it was created to address.
The Endowment operates under its own governance structure, separate from Cordis commercial operations. Allocation decisions are made against the four domains, not against client development objectives. The work must justify itself on its own terms.
Capital is allocated from firm revenue on a recurring basis. The Endowment is not dependent on individual contributions or external fundraising. It grows with the practice and is protected from commercial pressure by structural separation.
Each domain is evaluated against defined outcomes: research citations, advisor network reach, access program completions, community transition metrics. Volume is not the measure. Structural impact is.
The Endowment is one of them. It will be here long after any single transaction has closed.