I have spent the last decade closing deals from the corporate side. Now I do it for funds, family offices and private shareholders.
One principal M&A lead practice. Mandates are taken selectively. Bench depth assembled from a vetted network of diligence and legal specialists when a specific transaction calls for it.
The work
More than ten years in M&A mid-cap advisory. Then another eight years in corporate development at a formerly listed, later PE-backed, EUR30B+ wholesale and foodservice platform. I led carve-outs from the sell side, executed buy-and-build add-ons and strategic partnerships across DACH and CEE, and produced deal recommendations for the C-suite, the board, and the PE sponsor.
The discipline I learned in that seat: define the question before running the process. Most M&A deals fail because the question was never sharp.
Thorough preparation is key. Excellence in execution, and speed, matter more in the early stages. A good directional answer, acted on decisively, beats a perfect analysis that arrives too late.
How I run mandates
Rules that hold across every engagement.
Recommendation first
Every deliverable opens with the answer. Reasoning follows. “It depends” only when the optionality is real.
Execution speed beats precision early
Directional in two days, sharpened over weeks. The cost of being late on a live deal is far higher than the cost of revising assumptions.
Risks on the page
Top three things that would break the thesis, named directly. Burying bad news loses trust permanently.
Decisions, not analyses
Two or three options, tradeoffs costed honestly, recommended path with reasoning.
Capacity
One principal. One embedded engagement at a time. Concurrent project mandates and partnerships accepted where the capacity allows.