Partner-led, independent, and compensated by one party to a transaction. Every firm says it puts the client first. Good intentions get tested the first time they are inconvenient. Structure does not.
No balance sheet, no capital markets desk, and no financing relationship with the sponsors bidding on our clients. We charge two fees for two jobs: a work fee for the preparation and a success fee for the outcome. The preparation is paid for either way, which is what lets us tell an owner to wait.
No handoff to people the client has never met. That is only workable if everyone on the team has sat on a side of this table rather than studied one, and can hold the financial complexity and the family complexity in the same hour. Most firms are built from one seat. This one is built from three.
Where the capital comes from. How an institutional buyer underwrites a company, what a credit committee asks, and which numbers survive that room.
Where the owner sits when the proceeds are real, the decisions are irreversible, and the family is in the room.
Payroll met, customers kept, and the call on whether to reinvest. People here have built and run companies, which is why the questions land where an owner lives.
No handoff to a junior team, and no one the client has never met. The person who set the number is on the file when the process turns hard, and through the quarter after the wire.
On the left, what this market accepts. On the right, what the firm commits to on every mandate, in writing, before the work begins. Nothing on this page is an adjective. Pick any row and it is checkable.
Every incentive the firm carries points at the client's outcome, because that is the only place its revenue comes from. Fees are quoted in writing before work begins, and anything unapproved is borne by Cordis.
Seven rules, applied to every engagement. They are the test a deliverable passes inside the firm, deliberately harder than the one it meets outside. A document that fails one is rewritten rather than sent.
Value defense is built on what is durable rather than what was achieved at high water. Every multiple anchored has to hold under cyclical stress.
Every deliverable is written as though the buyer reads it first, positioned with the diligence question already answered.
Assertions are backstopped by diligence-survivable evidence. Nothing is written that cannot be defended on the conference-room whiteboard.
Every deliverable carries an internal version holding the raw evidence and source notes, and an external version holding the curated message.
Where half a turn cannot be added through positioning, process or normalization, the firm says so and points elsewhere.
The arithmetic is real. The framing is engineered. Nothing is anchored on a number that cannot be defended.
The sequence is documented and applied the same way every time. The application is judgment-tuned to the specific seller, buyer universe and category dynamics.
Every document that reaches a buyer, an owner or an intermediary is tested against these first. One that fails is rewritten rather than sent. The file reads the same from the first page to the last.
The firm is deliberately small and senior. The person who establishes what a company is worth is the person who negotiates for it, from the first call through the quarter after the wire.
Meet the team