A Sell-Side Deal Operating System for a Boutique M&A Advisory
A boutique sell-side M&A advisory running lower-middle-market deals with a small team and high deal volume, where every engagement starts from messy financials and ends in hand-built buyer outreach.
What they were dealing with
Every deal started the same way: an analyst rebuilding the full financial picture by hand from the seller's statements, models, and tax returns before any real work could begin.
A single CIM took anywhere from 10 to 40+ hours, and for messy financials it stretched into weeks. Worse, every time the model turned, the CIM charts had to be rebuilt by hand, three or four times per deal. Version 44 of the deck was not unusual, and the weekends were gone.
The buyer side was no better. The corporate CRM went unused, so there was no central buyer list. Analysts prodded the MDs for names, then built outreach lists of hundreds of buyers by hand in Excel. A single well-researched outreach package took four to six hours of analyst time per target.
Earlier attempts at AI tools had been abandoned. The deal-breaker was always the same: an analyst could not tie what the tool produced back to the actual source, so nobody trusted it on a live deal.
The solution
Every figure traces back to its source document, and a human reviews every CIM draft, buyer list, and outreach message before it goes anywhere. The system produces drafts the team checks, never final output it sends on its own.
An intake step that ingests the seller's financials once, statements, models, and tax returns, and builds a single structured deal record that everything else reads from.
A CIM drafting assistant that writes the first-draft sections and generates the financial charts directly from the deal record, so when the model turns you regenerate the exhibits instead of rebuilding them by hand.
A buyer-list builder that assembles and enriches a strategic and financial buyer list scored against the deal thesis, replacing the hand-built Excel list and the prodding of MDs for names.
An outreach-package generator that drafts the teaser and a tailored message for each buyer, turning four to six hours of analyst work per target into minutes of drafting plus a human review.
A single deal dashboard that tracks where every buyer sits in the process, populated automatically by the system so the buyer database stays current without anyone logging activity by hand.
The impact
~65%
Less time on the CIM first draft, down from the typical 10 to 40+ hour build
~80%
Less analyst time per buyer outreach package, down from 4 to 6 hours each
500+
Buyer names assembled and enriched automatically instead of by hand in Excel
100%
Of figures traceable to source, with a human checkpoint on every output
Want results like these?
Let's talk about what we can build for your team.