With the (severely) high level of competition in the M&A market, investment bankers driving accelerating timelines, and the absolute mandate to improve the assets acquired, Private Equity and Corporate Development teams require a trusted thought partner to support Commercial Diligence efforts. They deserve a partner that understands and embraces the challenges. A partner that respects the timelines, but still puts effectiveness over efficiency, every time.
Matters Graph provides truth-based insights in the moments that offer necessary advantages in both open and proprietary deal processes (on the rare occasions when you can architect a proprietary opportunity).
We love the owner-operator, active investor mindset – starting with the signals, the idea, and an emerging and original thesis defining its value and its value creation strategy (both better be original, or you will find that there is little way to distinguish your underwriting from other bidders), indicating there is something of greater value to be made here and identifying the potential to deploy strategies that will craft the asset into something of meaningfully greater commercial value.
We also understand how challenging your job is (we have witnessed it over these past 25 years), and we know why we exist: to help.
Our founding (and forever) purpose (2017) has been to support investors through their considerations for making acquisitions and defining effective value generation plans.
Matters Graph works with our PE clients pre- and post-transaction. For many of our clients, this means starting early (to gain an advantage in processes and to develop advantageous relationships with counter parties). – i.e., we are conditioned to start pre-process to support early jury and to preserve and optimize spend. We hold that Commercial Diligence should be the basis of early thesis development and should be an early, if not the first, spend item. Being built for the active investor, we embrace narrow scope (and smaller spend) exercises staged to resolve key questions as they emerge to support iterative deal team decision making.
Matters Graph only works on the buy side. We respect the value of sell-side Vendor Due Diligence work in creating value for sellers, widening the landscape of potential investors, and setting the narrative to the seller's (and banker's) advantage. However, we have long since determined that the promotional bias inherent in sell-side work does not build trust in the work product ("it seems it's always 'up and to the right'") or the consulting firm. And, respectfully, we hold that it weakens the trust that discerning investors, co-investors, and lenders need to rely on to achieve their objectives. Moreover, we determined that the skills associated with developing sell-side decks are very different from the skills required to build and maintain the necessary critical thinking and scrutinous muscles to answer the questions that will determine the outcomes that prove to matter.
From top to bottom, we embrace our purpose – to be earnest, rigorous, truthful, and to help our clients' crack the case' and make the wisest decisions before they deploy capital.
