Corporate Finance
Value is created continuously and priced occasionally. We work on both.
Build the financial capability that creates enterprise value.
Our corporate finance partners combine transaction-grade financial analysis with continuous operational data to help CFOs, owners and management teams create enterprise value and understand what their business earns, what it can support, and what it is worth.
The questions we are brought in to answer:
- 01Which of my customers and products actually make money once real service costs are counted?
- 02How much cash is trapped inside my own operating cycle, and how do I get it out?
- 03Where am I losing margin, and how much of it?
- 04Am I pricing correctly, and what is undisciplined discounting costing me?
- 05How much debt can this business genuinely carry, and what would it cost?
- 06Is dilution cheaper than debt for what I am trying to do?
- 07What happens to my covenants if next year is worse than planned?
- 08Would a lender or a buyer trust my numbers as they stand today?
- 09What is my business worth right now, and what specifically would make it worth more?
- 10What will diligence find, and can I fix it before someone else finds it?
- 11Which parts of this business should I stop investing in?
- 12How do I know my forecast is right?
Answering them requires both rigorous analysis and the judgment of advisors who have seen the consequences.
Explore Corporate Finance services.
01Performance
Where profit is created, and whether it persists.
Profitability and Margin
Where profit is created becomes clear when cost is allocated against what actually drives it. We build customer and product-level profitability using operational drivers rather than revenue-based allocation, construct the price waterfall from list to realized price across invoice-level history, and establish the segmentation and governance that hold the gains after implementation.
Margin recovered this way is close to pure. It requires no incremental cost, no capital expenditure and no additional headcount, and it compounds annually rather than releasing once.
Customer and Revenue Quality
The durability of revenue is measurable. We build cohort analysis and retention behaviour beneath the reported figure, map concentration by customer and by contract, and test how much of what is described as recurring genuinely recurs.
This is what determines a multiple more directly than growth does, and it is rarely measured at this scale.
Contract and Commercial Terms Review
A company’s contract base can be read structurally rather than one agreement at a time. We extract renewal dates and cliffs, change-of-control provisions, exclusivity and most-favoured-nation terms, price escalators never exercised, and termination rights across the full base.
The output is a forward calendar of commercial risk and opportunity, built from documents the company already holds.
Cost Structure and Procurement
Categories that have never been competitively tested usually reward testing. We build spend analysis from payables detail across freight, packaging, insurance, MRO, utilities, telecom, professional services and benefits, then address fragmentation, off-contract purchasing and unbenchmarked renewals through structured sourcing.
02Liquidity
Capital the company already owns.
Working Capital and Liquidity
Cash held inside the operating cycle is capital a company already owns. We measure receivables, inventory and payables behaviour against contracted terms, customer by customer and vendor by vendor, and quantify what can be released with defined ownership and timing on each item.
Alongside it, we build the liquidity instrumentation a business runs on: rolling thirteen-week cash forecasting driven by actual collection and payment patterns, which converts a surprise into a warning.
Inventory and Supply Chain Finance
What is held on the balance sheet carries a cost that is rarely quantified. We build inventory by SKU with last-movement dating, size obsolescence and slow-moving exposure, quantify carrying cost, and measure supplier terms against what comparable businesses obtain.
This addresses what is held rather than how quickly it turns, which makes it distinct from the working capital cycle itself.
03Capital
What the business can support, and where it should be deployed.
Capital Structure and Capacity
Capital decisions improve when the inputs are known. We size debt capacity against coverage and liquidity rather than leverage alone, test covenant headroom against the operating case with breach dates projected forward, compare the cost of each instrument on a like-for-like basis, and model dilution explicitly against the debt alternative.
Capital Expenditure and Investment Appraisal
Capital decisions improve further when prior ones are reviewed. We assess which projects are funded against the returns available elsewhere in the business, and we review completed investments against the returns that were claimed for them.
Post-investment review changes how the next decision gets made, and it is the step most companies omit.
Forecasting and Scenario Analysis
Strategic options can be priced before they are committed to. We construct base, downside and upside cases from operating drivers and stress them against rate movement, demand contraction, customer loss and cost inflation, so the financial consequence of a decision is known in advance of it.
04Value
What the business is worth, and what would make it worth more.
Valuation and Decision Support
Knowing what a business is worth changes what an owner can do with it. We construct an evidenced valuation range from the business as it operates and from comparable transactions, and quantify the distance between current value and achievable value.
Where a decision requires a position no interested party can supply, we provide independent analysis to boards, shareholders and fiduciaries.
Value Drivers and Transaction Readiness
The multiple is set by factors the income statement does not record: customer concentration, key-person dependence, management depth, contract quality and revenue durability. We work on those directly, document the quality of earnings position as adjustments are made, and construct standalone financials where a division has not been reported separately.
Improvements of this kind take one to three years to register in the numbers, which is why the work begins well before a decision requires it.
05Reporting and Ongoing Mandates
The instrumentation the business runs on.
Financial Reporting and Instrumentation
Reporting becomes an instrument rather than a record when it is built on drivers. We establish accrual-basis monthly close with revenue recognized as earned, driver-based forecasting constructed on volume and price, and management reporting that gives the board, the lender and the owner a single view of performance.
This is built to a defined scope and transferred to the company’s own finance function.
Integration and Post-Acquisition Performance
An acquisition thesis can be tracked rather than assumed. For acquisitive clients we measure synergy realization against the model, consolidate the chart of accounts and reporting across entities, manage working capital across the combined business, and report on whether the investment case is delivering.
A transaction closes. The performance of it continues.
Explore our integrated capabilities.
Corporate Finance work rarely stays inside one discipline. Each engagement draws on the rest of the firm as the situation requires.
Capital Markets
Where the conclusion is that capital should be raised, refinanced or released, the same partners structure and secure it across credit, equity and asset monetization.
M&A and Strategic Advisory
Where a transaction is warranted, the analytical foundation built here carries directly into the process. Diligence moves faster and the position is defended on evidence already documented.
Intelligence
The continuous read of a company through the market’s lens, including the movement in its estimated value range and what capital in its sector is currently doing.
How the analysis is built.
Working across this range is possible because the underlying analysis is built once and applied throughout.
Our systems connect into a company’s financial, operating and commercial data and resolve it to transaction level: general ledger and sub-ledger detail, invoice and line-item history, inventory movement by unit, order and shipment records, customer and contract data, payables detail and bank activity. A business at this scale generates hundreds of thousands of such records each month and millions across a two-year history.
The analytical value sits in the cross-referencing rather than the volume. Cost to serve becomes visible only when financial data is joined to operational drivers such as order counts, line counts, shipments, returns, expedites and credit memos. Realized pricing becomes visible only when invoice-level detail is joined to volume by customer. Working capital performance becomes visible only when aging detail is measured against terms actually contracted. Each of these answers sits across functions that, in most organizations, neither report to one another nor reconcile.
That position is then measured against sector benchmarks, precedent transactions and realized execution terms from our own record, which is what renders a company’s figures interpretable rather than merely accurate.
The analysis runs continuously rather than at a quarterly close. When a decision arrives, it already exists.
Our work does not expire.
A margin improvement holds for as long as the discipline holds. Cash released from the operating cycle stays released. Reporting built on drivers continues to produce a forward view every month it runs. Concentration reduced, management depth built, contract quality improved: each one raises what the business is worth for as long as the business exists.
The analytical position compounds alongside it. Each month of instrumentation deepens the record. Each benchmark added sharpens the next comparison. A company two years into an engagement is not being read for the first time when a decision arrives, which is what allows a decision to be made quickly and defended on evidence.
The work is valuable whether or not it is ever tested. Where it is tested, by a lender, a board, an acquirer or a buyer, it holds.
