Cordis GlobalAdvisory · Intelligence · Ventures
The Team

The people on your side of the table.

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.

Intentional in size

A named partner carries every mandate.

The firm is small on purpose. There is no junior team the client never meets, and no handoff from the pitch to the people who do the work. The partner who prices the company is the partner who negotiates for it, and the one still on the file the quarter after the wire.

The founder

The standard this market is adopting, we put in writing.

Our founder spent his career on the institutional side, Wall Street capital formation and exit planning at AllianceBernstein, then built the firm on one conviction: the discipline reserved for the largest companies belongs to the ones that hold up the economy. He is the author of Buyer-Ready and The Off-Market Method, and Head of Research at the Cordis Institute, where the frameworks are published, dated and open to challenge. The standard did not exist in this market. He wrote it down.

Ron Smith, Founding Partner
Ron Smith presenting
The partners

The people who carry the mandate.

Ron Smith

Ron Smith

Founding Partner · CM&AA®

Ron grew up inside the family business, a multi-generational HVAC company, and learned early that its decisions reach past the company into family and identity. He began on Wall Street in capital formation, then worked with founders and multi-generational families on exit planning at AllianceBernstein. His conclusion is that regret rarely comes from price. It comes from blind spots, and from trade-offs nobody named in time. He is the author of Buyer-Ready and The Off-Market Method, and Head of Research at the Cordis Institute.

Full profile & Q&A →
Chris Rossi

Chris Rossi

Senior Vice President

Chris spent nearly a decade on Wall Street, close to capital formation, then built businesses of his own. That pairing is what he brings to an owner: how institutional capital reads a company from the outside, and what those same decisions feel like when it is your payroll, your customers and your name on the lease. He advises founders and families through growth, capital strategy and ownership transitions, and he listens first.

One firm, three arms

An advisory practice, a research institute, and a publishing house.

Cordis is built the way an institution is, not a single desk. The advisory work is tested against research that is published in the open, and the method is made available to owners long before a mandate is.

Cordis Global

The advisory practice. Founder-owned and family-held companies, from $5M to $250M, advised across the whole arc of a transaction.

Cordis Institute

The research arm. Peer-reviewed working papers on lower-middle-market exit dynamics, dated and published on SSRN, where the method can be checked and argued with.

Cordis Foundry

The method in the owner's hands. The Off-Market Method as a book, a workbook and a program, so the thinking is available long before a mandate is. offmarketmethod.com →

The team on every mandate

Mira Ebert

Client Executive

Erin Donaghy

Coordinator

Alex Rosen

Associate

Morgan Halpern

Associate
Where we work

Across the country, and on your floor.

Engagements run across the country and globally. We are one team, and we travel to the mandate: on site, on the factory floor, in your office or in your advisor's office. The work is senior, and it comes to you.

A confidential conversation is where it starts.

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