Financial Modeling & Valuation · Investment Memos & IC Materials
A full DCF, LBO and IC memo package for an acquisition
Client: An acquirer evaluating a privately held B2B business.
The brief
The client had the target's raw historical financials and needed an institutional-quality view of value, from normalized earnings to returns under leverage, ready for an investment committee.
What we did
- Normalized the historical financials, including sign-convention fixes and add-backs for shareholder compensation, to reach a defensible adjusted EBITDA.
- Built three-statement projections driven by a revenue model with base, upside and downside scenarios.
- Valued the business with a DCF and an LBO, with sensitivity tables on the key drivers and a bridge reconciling the valuation outputs.
- Wrote a full investment committee memo on top of the model.
- Recalculated and checked every formula before delivery, so the workbook had zero formula errors.
The result
A ten-tab Excel workbook with live formulas: historical analysis, projections, scenarios, DCF, LBO, sensitivities and a valuation bridge. It came with an IC memo the client could take straight into its approval process.
Screening & Preliminary Analysis
Screening more than 100 companies for a permanent-capital acquirer
Client: A long-term acquirer of founder-owned businesses in North America.
The brief
The client needed to turn long lists of company URLs into a prioritized pipeline. Each company had to be scored against a strict thesis: founder-led, no institutional funding, recurring and mission-critical revenue, North American, and within a defined size band for the top tier.
What we did
- Researched every company against the acquisition criteria and placed it in Tier A, B or C, or disqualified it with a stated reason.
- Applied consistent disqualifiers: services-led or agency models, hardware-led revenue, resellers without their own IP, VC or PE backing, and non-North American headquarters.
- Tracked open questions, such as unconfirmed founder identity, possible leadership changes or hardware revenue mix, as explicit flags for diligence rather than silent assumptions.
- Covered several niche verticals, each with its own terminology, buyers and disqualifiers.
The result
Tiered, sourced company profiles delivered as Excel reports and an interactive screening dashboard. In one batch of about 67 companies, five were promoted to Tier A for direct outreach. In an earlier two-vertical cycle, 20 companies were assessed: ten were tiered and ten were disqualified with documented reasons.
Deal Sourcing & Origination
Building acquisition target universes across seven niche verticals
Client: An acquirer looking for independent, founder-owned targets in North America.
The brief
The client wanted target lists in niche verticals that standard databases cover poorly. It excluded PE and VC-backed companies, public company subsidiaries and known roll-up platforms.
What we did
- Mapped each vertical from web research, industry sources and third-party lists, including screening large third-party data exports for genuine fits.
- Removed every company already owned by a public acquirer, a roll-up or institutional investors.
- Delivered each list with firmographics and decision-maker contacts, ready to import into a CRM.
The result
Clean, tiered target lists across seven verticals, totalling more than 150 qualifying companies, from a handful in the smallest markets to 50 in the largest.
Where a market turned out to be heavily consolidated, we reported that as a finding about the market rather than padding the list.
Deal Sourcing & Origination
Executive contact research for M&A outreach across six verticals
Client: A buyer running direct outreach to company owners and executives.
The brief
The client had target lists but not the people behind them. It needed verified C-level and VP-level decision-makers for each company, with gaps clearly documented.
What we did
- Researched batches of 45 to 50 companies per vertical across six different markets.
- Identified the right decision-makers and collected name, title, email, phone and LinkedIn for each.
- Flagged missing or uncertain data in the deliverable instead of silently dropping it.
The result
Structured Excel contact files for each vertical. One project alone covered about 49 companies and produced 87 verified contacts across 42 of them.
Deal Sourcing & Origination
A verified founder list for a PE capital partner in a fragmented services niche
Client: A private equity capital partner building an acquisition pipeline in a fragmented healthcare services niche.
The brief
The client wanted direct contact with the founders and owners of independent, owner-operated practices across four US states. Every contact had to be a verified decision-maker at an independent, owner-operated practice.
What we did
- Defined the target profile with the client: practice type, ownership, geography and the right decision-maker.
- Built the practice universe and identified the founder or owner of each practice.
- Verified contact details before delivery.
The result
A list of 51 verified founder and owner contacts across the four states, ready for outreach. It was delivered with a proposal for a follow-on outreach pilot.
Market & Industry Research
Bottom-up market sizing for a software platform
Client: A software business serving a specialized healthcare segment.
The brief
The client needed a defensible estimate of its addressable market. Top-down figures from industry reports varied widely and could not be tied to real customers.
What we did
- Built a bottom-up count of addressable facilities using federal facility data.
- Applied pricing assumptions grounded in the client's own customer data.
- Checked the result against third-party industry sources.
The result
A total addressable market of about $215 million. Every step traces back to a facility count and a customer-based price point.
