Four practices, one discipline. We take a small number of mandates and give each of them the attention an institution cannot. What follows is the whole of what we do, and, just as importantly, how we are paid for it.
Buy-side and sell-side advisory for private companies, family offices, and closely-held groups. We run the whole transaction (positioning, valuation, approach, diligence, negotiation, and close) so that you can keep running the business while it happens.
Most owners sell once. We have done it many times, on both sides of the table, and the difference shows in the terms. We are unhurried where it pays to be unhurried, and decisive where hesitation costs money. One principal stays with you from first conversation to final signature.
Private equity, growth capital, and structured debt for businesses at an inflection point. We access institutional capital on your terms, structuring arrangements that preserve control and protect the culture that made the business worth backing in the first place.
We take no introductory fees and hold no allegiance to any fund. We are paid when the outcome serves you, which means the advice you receive is about your capital structure, not our relationships.
For genuine complexity: stressed balance sheets, creditor pressure, strategic impasse. We stabilise the immediate situation, reposition the business, and create options where none seemed available. We have sat across the table from most of the parties you will face, and we know how they think.
Few situations are as terminal as they first appear. Most have a cleaner resolution than the panic around them suggests, but only if the right people are brought in early, and the difficult conversations are had honestly.
A retained voice for boards and founders at the moments that matter, with no product to sell, no institutional mandate to satisfy, and no fee that depends on a particular outcome. We are engaged precisely because we have nothing to gain from telling you what you want to hear.
It is a rarer service than it sounds. Most advisors have a relationship to protect. We have only the engagement in front of us, and our standing for the next one.
A single conversation, without agenda. We listen to the situation as you see it and ask the questions others typically do not. No pitch, no proposal, only an honest read of whether we can be useful.
Two to three weeks of proprietary study. We assess the business, the market, and the available options before forming a view. The analysis is never shaped by the outcome we would prefer.
We present our findings plainly, including the parts that are uncomfortable to hear. This directness is what separates genuine counsel from institutional salesmanship.
When you decide to proceed, we work beside you to completion. One principal throughout. No handoffs, no juniors managing the relationship, no dilution of what you were promised.
We charge a retainer for the work of thinking, and a completion fee aligned to the outcome. We do not bury incentives in the structure, and we do not earn from introductions, products, or volume. When the retainer and the completion fee point in the same direction as your interests, the advice tends to follow.
If, after our initial analysis, we conclude that you do not need us, or that someone else would serve you better, we will tell you so, and the conversation will have cost you nothing. We would rather decline a mandate than take one we cannot honour.