M&A advisory
You only get one shot at your exit. The preparation starts 18 months before you need it.
M&A advisory from someone who has led two full sell-side processes, sat in the data room, and negotiated deal terms across the table from Blackstone. Goldman Sachs Investment Banking background. Both sides of the table.
Why 18 months matters
Most founders think about exit preparation when a buyer shows up or when investors start pushing for liquidity. By then, you're already in a reactive process. The company you're showing a buyer is the company you built without knowing they were watching.
Starting 18 months out gives you time to do the things that actually move your valuation: clean up financial reporting so it tells the right story, address the operational issues that will surface in due diligence, optimize the numbers that buyers use to set multiples, and build the financial infrastructure that makes your company look like it's ready for new ownership.
Buyers who do this work upfront command higher multiples, close faster, and lose fewer deals to diligence discoveries. Those aren't abstract claims. They're what we saw in both exits: the 2019 sale to Zovio and the 2022 sale to Simplilearn, a Blackstone portfolio company.
Sell-side advisory
Full sell-side process management, from the first buyer conversation to close. We've been through it twice. Here's where the work actually happens.
Exit readiness
Audit-quality financial statements, clean revenue recognition, normalized EBITDA, and a financial model that tells your growth story without asking buyers to take your word for it. Most companies discover their financial reporting has problems when a buyer finds them. We find them first.
Valuation and positioning
Understanding what drives your multiple and what's suppressing it. Buyers use financial models to set prices. Sellers who understand those models can position their financials to work with them. Detailed DCF, LBO, and comparable transaction analysis to establish defensible valuation floors before the process starts.
Due diligence management
Data room construction, financial diligence support, and QofE preparation. Buyers will find what you haven't addressed. We've been on the receiving end of sophisticated institutional diligence and know what's coming. Getting ahead of it prevents the late-stage surprises that crater valuations or kill deals entirely.
Buyer process management
Identifying and qualifying strategic and financial buyers, managing the process to create competitive tension, and negotiating deal terms. A controlled process produces better outcomes than responding to unsolicited offers. When Blackstone is sitting across the table, you want someone who understands how that process works.
Banker and advisor coordination
Investment banks, legal counsel, and tax advisors all need coordination during a transaction. That coordination is the CFO's job. Having done it twice means knowing who needs what when, where information gets bottlenecked, and how to keep momentum when the inevitable complications arrive.
Management presentations
The story your company tells buyers determines how they model your future. Financial narrative development, investor presentation design, and management meeting preparation. The goal is a presentation that answers the questions buyers will ask before they ask them.
Buy-side advisory
Evaluating an acquisition requires someone who has done buy-side diligence and run the integration afterward. At Arist Education System, we didn't just model the acquisition of Alliant International University. We led the diligence, closed the deal, and then joined the company to execute the integration.
Most diligence processes miss what matters: not whether the historical financials are accurate (they usually are), but whether the forward model is achievable. That requires understanding the operational drivers, the cost structure, and the integration risk in detail, not just reviewing audited statements.
We build the financial model, stress test the assumptions, identify the things the seller didn't highlight in their deck, and develop the integration plan before the deal closes, not after.
What buy-side advisory covers
Acquisition evaluation
Financial model review, operational due diligence, combined-value analysis with real assumptions, and an honest assessment of integration risk. Including the parts of the model the seller will want to gloss over.
Valuation
DCF, LBO, and comparable transaction analysis to establish a defensible price. Not a number that justifies what you want to pay, but a number that reflects what the asset is worth in context.
Integration planning
The integration plan built before close, not scrambled together in the first 90 days. The deals that struggle are almost always the ones where integration planning started after signing.
Deal structuring and negotiation
Deal terms, representations and warranties, earnout structures, and working capital adjustments. The economic value in a deal often lives in the details of the purchase agreement, not the headline price.
The background
Goldman Sachs Investment Banking Division (Financial Sponsors Group), ranked top 10% of the global M&A analyst class in 2007 and 2008. Stockbridge Investors, part of Berkshire Partners. Led the 2019 sale of Fullstack Academy to Zovio (publicly traded) and the 2022 sale to Simplilearn (Blackstone portfolio company). Buy-side diligence and acquisition close at Arist Education System (Bertelsmann-backed), including the first conversion of a nonprofit university to a benefit corporation in the United States. 80+ companies analyzed at Stockbridge.
Thinking about a transaction?
Whether you're 18 months from a planned exit or a buyer just approached you out of nowhere, the earlier the conversation, the better the outcome. Tell us where you are.
Let's talk