London · Private M&A Advisory
Executive Partners
The advisors your advisors call.
Independent since 2003. Selective by design.
We study before we speak. We earn the mandate before we ask for it. If that sounds unhurried, it is, and it is the whole point.
Aurelius was built around a single refusal: that quality cannot survive volume. The large banks have conflicts woven into their structure. We do not. Our partners carry no competing mandates, no institutional interests, and nothing to sell you.
What we have is time, independent judgment, and a record of telling clients things that took courage to hear. That, more often than not, is what changed the outcome.
Buy-side and sell-side advisory for private companies, family offices, and closely-held groups. We run the whole transaction so you can keep running the business.
Private equity, growth capital, and structured debt for businesses at an inflection point, accessed on your terms, structured to preserve control and culture.
For genuine complexity: stressed balance sheets, creditor pressure, strategic impasse. We have seen most of it before. Few situations are as terminal as they first appear.
A retained voice for boards and founders: no product to sell, no fee that depends on a particular outcome. We are paid to tell you what we actually think.
We are not the right firm for everyone, and we have never tried to be. We take a small number of clients each year and give each of them the thing the large institutions cannot: undivided attention, and an opinion that owes nothing to anyone but you.
The work is quiet. Most of what we are proudest of will never be written about, and that is exactly as it should be. Discretion is not a courtesy we extend. It is the product.
With our regards,
“You are not payingJames Aurelius · Founding Partner
for our time. You are paying
for our judgment.”
Founders leave value and control on the table. Rarely because of the business; almost always because of the timing of the advice, and who gave it.
Read essay →Most restructurings fail not because the business is unsalvageable, but because the brief was set too late and the advisor had too little to work with.
Read essay →The terms of institutional capital rarely reflect what a founder actually needs. An advisor without a relationship to protect will tell you so.
Read essay →