SENTRY · Active
Cordis MRI
·
Market Readiness Intelligence
Buyers have done hundreds of deals.
They have a playbook. A number. They come prepared.
Founders don’t have decades to build their own model.
They have the Cordis MRI.
The Cordis MRI.
SENTRY · Outcome Distribution Engine
Initializing
SAMPLE PROFILE · $12.4M REVENUE
0
/ 100
Capital Certainty
Floor
Median
Ceiling
Active Buyer Lanes
Search / Ind. Sponsor
Base Institutional
PE Add-On
Family Office
Strategic
40−60%
of signed deals are
repriced before close
repriced before close
20−40%
of net proceeds determined
by structure, not price
by structure, not price
3−5×
difference in outcome between
the best and worst buyer
the best and worst buyer
The difference between
offer and outcome
can be life changing.
offer and outcome
can be life changing.
Where You Are
Every founder who built something real
is already in one of four positions.
Most just haven't named it yet.
is already in one of four positions.
Most just haven't named it yet.
The Cordis MRI is built for founders who intend to shape what comes next. Protect what you built. Prepare for what comes next. Sell now. Where you are determines what it does for you. Not whether it applies.
Frame 01
The Owner Who Plans Ahead
An ownership change is inevitable. Six months or six years out, you're already thinking about what the business needs to look like when that moment arrives. The question is whether what you're building today will translate to value when it does.
Most founders who plan ahead still plan without a model. They invest in the business on instinct, improving what feels important, and hope it reads well to a buyer when the time comes. The Cordis MRI changes what that time looks like. With a clear picture of how buyers will underwrite your specific business, every improvement you make between now and a transaction is intentional. You know which variables move the number. You know which ones buyers discount regardless of how much you invest in them. The founders who run the MRI early don't arrive at a transaction hoping their preparation paid off. They arrive knowing it did.
Frame 02
The Decided Founder
An ownership change is coming. You know it, and you're already thinking about what it takes to be ready. The question is whether what you're doing will translate to value at close.
The Cordis MRI maps exactly which improvements move your transaction outcome and which ones don't. Without it, preparation is guesswork. Time and capital spread across what feels important. With it, every decision you make between now and close is sequenced by what it actually returns to you at exit. The founders who prepare with the Cordis MRI don't just arrive ready. They arrive having invested in the areas that move the number most. That is a different kind of readiness entirely.
Frame 03
The Legacy Owner
You are not planning to sell. But you have something to protect. Whether you pass it to family, transition it to a partner, or the business changes hands after you are gone, what you built deserves to transfer at its full value. Most don't, without the right intelligence in place.
If you were incapacitated tomorrow, could your family sell this business and receive its full value? Could your partner buy out your stake on terms that reflected what you built? The Cordis MRI ensures the business will be understood at its full value. Not to trigger a sale. So that what you built can be protected, transferred, or monetized on your terms, not someone else's emergency.
Frame 04
The Disengaged Owner
You are not thinking about this. The business runs, and that is enough.
This engagement is not for you. Not yet.
Three of those four positions have something at stake right now.
Which one are you in?
Start your Cordis MRI
Which one are you in?
The Misalignment Tax
Every buyer who makes a serious offer
has already run a model against you.
has already run a model against you.
Before any buyer submits an offer on a private business, their team has built an internal diligence model. It maps your revenue quality, your customer concentration, your management dependency, your working capital variability, your warranty exposure. It identifies every place where what you believe your business is worth diverges from what they can justify paying after diligence. That model exists specifically to find the distance between your number and theirs. It closes that gap in their favor.
What Buyers Know That You Don't
Between 40 and 60 percent of signed LOIs are repriced before close: not because something fraudulent surfaced, but because findings emerged that the seller did not anticipate and the buyer had already modeled. Price is not proceeds. The gap between the LOI number and cash at closing can be 20 to 40 percent: earnouts that convert guaranteed consideration into contingent payment, escrow holdbacks that transfer risk back at no additional compensation, rollover equity on terms the buyer controls. In 8 out of 10 repriced transactions, the seller had access to the same information the buyer used to renegotiate. They simply had not organized it before the process began. That gap is the Misalignment Tax. It does not appear at closing. It accumulates in the months before any buyer sees your books, in every decision made without knowing what they would find, what they would use, and what they were already planning to subtract.
What This Means
Every question a buyer cannot answer with your data,
they answer with your price.
they answer with your price.
"Due diligence is not a confirmation process. It is a discounting process. Every finding the buyer surfaces that you cannot explain is a number subtracted from your price."
Cordis · Transaction Intelligence
40−60%
LOI's retrade after signing
Most founders learn this number during their own deal. By then, there is nothing left to do about it.
92%
LMM deals include post-close adjustments
Post-close adjustments are not the exception. They are the structure. Nearly every deal in the lower-middle-market includes them.
20−40%
Proceeds swing from structure
Before a single diligence finding. The deal structure you agree to at LOI can move your proceeds more than anything the buyer finds afterward.
8 in10
Failed deals: seller had the data
Harvard Business Review: The data existed. It was unused, unorganized, or unavailable when the buyer needed an answer. That gap became a deduction.
The Cordis MRI puts you through
the buyer's diligence process
before any buyer does.
the buyer's diligence process
before any buyer does.
Everything they would find, you find first. Everything they would use to move your number, you see first. You do not eliminate the process. You pre-experience it in private, with enough time to act on what it reveals.
The Engine
We run the buyer's model
from your side of the table.
from your side of the table.
The analytical methodology institutional buyers use to model acquisition targets has been refined across thousands of real transactions and embedded inside every serious financial sponsor and strategic acquirer in private markets. Cordis put that same methodology to work for the other side of the table. That reorientation is what the Cordis MRI delivers.
The Cordis MRI is powered by SENTRY — Sequential Estimation Network for Transaction Risk and Yield — a simulation engine that runs tens of thousands of probabilistic iterations per buyer lane, triangulating across live market data, closed transaction outcomes, and Cordis proprietary engagement intelligence to refine its priors. Not listed multiples. Not comp sheets. Actual closed deals — what buyers paid, what structure they imposed, and what variables moved the number in each direction. A machine learning calibration layer refines the model continuously, identifying which patterns predicted which outcomes across margin profiles, concentration levels, owner dependency, and revenue trajectory. The result is not a number. It is a probability distribution — a full outcome range showing where deals of your specific profile actually close, what compresses the floor, and what unlocks the ceiling. That model updates its calibration with every engagement we complete, progressively narrowing the uncertainty bands around each buyer archetype.
The Simulation
Every outcome that exists
for your business.
Rendered from real transaction data.
for your business.
Rendered from real transaction data.
Most advisors show you three scenarios — base, bull, bear. Three points they selected from a range they estimated. A point estimate, however well dressed, is still a guess. SENTRY runs tens of thousands of iterations and returns the full probability distribution. The most likely outcome is not the most important information. What matters is the shape. A distribution that clusters tightly tells you the market has a clear view of your business — and you can negotiate from that certainty. A distribution with a long left tail tells you there is a specific risk a buyer will find and use to move your number after the LOI is signed. A wide spread tells you buyer selection is your highest-leverage decision — the difference between your floor and ceiling is not luck, it is who is sitting across from you. Without the full picture, you know your number. The buyer knows your distribution. That asymmetry is the entire problem.
3×4×5×6×7×8×9×10×11×
What you're seeing
Each particle is a simulated transaction outcome. Watch the field scatter, then organize into five distinct buyer populations. Same business. Different buyers. Radically different outcomes.
Where the value lives
The probability mass tells you more than the peak. Where clusters form is your advantage. Where tails extend is what the buyer has already planned to use at the table.
What changes this
Preparation shifts the distribution right. Buyer selection narrows it. The Cordis MRI shows you both levers before any process begins.
Search / Ind. Sponsor
—
Median outcome
Base Institutional
—
Median outcome
PE Add-On
—
Median outcome
Family Office
—
Median outcome
Strategic Acquirer
—
Median outcome
Iterations Run
0
Buyer Lanes Active
0
Variables Assessed
0
Outcome Floor
—
Outcome Ceiling
—
The Asymmetry
The buyer will have this picture
before they sit down.
Now you do too.
before they sit down.
Now you do too.
SENTRY · Intervention Modeling
What actually moves
the number.
the number.
The MRI doesn't just show you where you stand. It models what each action returns. Every intervention is sequenced by enterprise value recovered — before any buyer sees your books. Most founders spend the last year before a transaction improving things that feel important. SENTRY identifies which three or four actually change what a buyer will pay.
Interventions
Sequenced by EV recovered
01
Revenue Legibility
Normalized billing structure. Price-cut probability drops 42% to 18%.
+$1.6M
at exit · base case
02
Concentration Optics
Billing restructure on second-largest account. Dispersion narrows 31%.
+$1.2M
at exit · base case
03
Founder Dependency Discount
Document second-tier authority. PE discount eliminated. Strategic lane opens.
+$0.9M
at exit · base case
Combined uplift · base case
+$3.7M
Before any buyer engagement. Before any process begins.
Buyer Universe
Access probability by lane
Free · 3 Minutes
You just watched SENTRY run.
Now run it on your numbers.
Now run it on your numbers.
Run it on your numbers. Eight inputs. Two minutes. SENTRY narrows to the transactions that match your specific profile and returns a preliminary risk position. No email required to see the output.
Run the Preliminary Scan
Takes 3 minutes · No commitment · Results shown immediately
The Foundation
The market has a memory.
Most advisors don't read it.
Most advisors don't read it.
Every lower-middle-market transaction leaves a trace. Bank underwriting. Disclosed multiples. Buyer acquisition cadence. Structural terms. SENTRY reads those traces across thousands of closed deals — public records, licensed institutional data, and a proprietary layer that compounds with every engagement we run. The result is not a comparable set. It is a trained model. There is a material difference.
Public Record
SBA 7(a) Loan Data
~$30B+ transactions / yr
Public Record
SEC / EDGAR Filings
Acquirer disclosures
Licensed · Institutional
PitchBook
Active buyer universe
Licensed · Institutional
GF Data
LMM transaction multiples
Proprietary · Compounds
Cordis Engagement Data
Pattern recognition no outside source contains
Calibration & Training Layer
Output
SENTRY · Trained Simulation
Your distribution · 50,000+ iterations per lane · 12 to 15 buyer archetypes
Data Architecture · Selected Examples
Public records · Licensed institutional · Proprietary engagement data
Example · Public Record
SBA 7(a) Loan Data
Bank underwriting as transaction intelligence
Every SBA-backed acquisition loan is public record. Most advisors read it as lending data. SENTRY reads it as transaction data in disguise. The bank's underwriting reveals what a sophisticated lender believed the business was worth to secure against — separate from what the buyer claimed to be paying. That gap is one of the most revealing numbers in any transaction. It lets SENTRY reconstruct implied valuations behind thousands of lower-middle-market deals that never appeared in any comp database.
Example · Institutional
PitchBook · GF Data
Live buyer universe and transaction multiples by sector
PitchBook tracks the active buyer universe — who is acquiring, in which sectors, at what cadence. GF Data tracks PE transaction multiples by revenue band from real closed deals. Together they answer two questions at once: what have buyers paid, and how actively are they buying right now. A platform accelerating acquisitions in your sector is a materially different counterparty than their historical average suggests. SENTRY weights for that difference.
Proprietary · Compounds Over Time
Cordis Engagement Data
Pattern recognition no outside source contains
Every Cordis MRI engagement generates data no public source carries — which risk variables predicted retrade, which margin profiles invited post-close adjustment, which preparation steps actually moved the final number. No version of this dataset is available for purchase. It does not exist anywhere else. It is the reason SENTRY produces a trained model rather than a filtered comp sheet, and the reason that model sharpens with every engagement we run.
Converges Into Cordis Calibration Layer
The Calibration
Not a lookup.
A trained model.
A trained model.
The same transaction gets read from multiple angles simultaneously — what buyers paid, what structure they imposed, what lenders thought it was worth to secure against. That triangulation surfaces what no single source can: which variables predicted which outcomes. Which concentration thresholds triggered holdbacks. Which margin patterns invited retrade. That pattern recognition is not in any dataset you can buy.
What This Means
Your distribution reflects
real outcomes.
real outcomes.
When SENTRY produces a distribution for your engagement, the floor is where businesses with your risk configuration actually landed. The median is where deals at your variable profile closed. The ceiling is what preparation and buyer selection unlocked. There is no other instrument that produces this precision for a founder — and no way to know where you stand without it.
Live Signal · SENTRY Active Layer
PE Platform Cadence
Rolling acquisition pace by sector. Fund cycle positioning and dry powder velocity.
Sector Acceleration
12-month deal flow by buyer archetype. Who is moving, and how fast.
Structure Drift
Earnout and escrow trends by revenue band. Where buyers are pushing risk back to sellers.
Buyer behavior is not static. A PE platform that closed three acquisitions in your sector in the past twelve months is a fundamentally different counterparty than their historical average suggests — higher motivation, compressed timeline, real willingness to compete on structure. SENTRY's live signal layer tracks that cadence in real time. Your distribution reflects not just what buyers have paid historically, but what they are doing right now. That signal is not available from any static dataset.
Exclusive to full MRI engagement
The Gap
A comp sheet tells you what deals were marketed at.
SENTRY tells you what they closed at, and why.
Those are not the same document.
SENTRY tells you what they closed at, and why.
Those are not the same document.
Engagement Process
01
Weeks 1 to 2
Scan
Your financials, operations, and market position assessed across 12 buyer dimensions. The inputs are documents most founder-owned businesses already have — three years of financials, a basic org chart, customer revenue breakdown. No audit. No data room. Cordis establishes the baseline the buyer will use before your first conversation. Documented, verified, yours.
Output
You confirm the inputs before anything runs. If gaps exist, that is part of what the scan surfaces.
02
Weeks 2 to 3
Buyer Engine
SENTRY models 12 to 15 buyer archetypes against your profile — strategic acquirers, financial sponsors, family offices, platform operators — then narrows to the 4 to 6 active pathways most relevant to your business. Each buyer type values your business differently. Each runs a different diligence playbook. You need to know all of them before any of them knows you.
Output
Your specific buyer universe, ranked by access probability. Confirmed before the simulation runs.
03
Weeks 3 to 5
SENTRY Simulation
SENTRY runs 10,000+ simulated outcomes per active buyer lane, weighted against real closed transaction data. Every variable stress-tested against ranges drawn from actual deals — not assumptions, not benchmarks. The result is not a number. It is a distribution with a floor, a ceiling, and a probability mass that shows you where deals of your type actually close.
Output
Full outcome distribution per buyer lane. Floor, ceiling, median — with the probability weight behind each.
04
Weeks 5 to 6
Intervention Index
Every preparation lever sequenced by enterprise value recovered per estimated dollar spent, modeled at three readiness horizons: today, six months, twelve months. Not everything is worth fixing. Some things are not fixable. SENTRY tells you which is which — and for the things that won't change, it shows you how to own them before a buyer frames them against you. Three concentrated customers becomes three long-term contracts with documented renewal history. The MRI is not a to-do list. It is a positioning document.
Output
Complete Cordis MRI delivered. Yours to keep and use with any advisor, on any timeline.
SENTRY · Preliminary Scan
Eight inputs. Two minutes.
See what the buyer sees first.
See what the buyer sees first.
Enter eight inputs. SENTRY runs a preliminary exposure scan and returns your risk position across the dimensions buyers underwrite first — revenue quality, concentration, dependency, trend. This is not the full engagement. It is enough to show you the shape of what exists — and whether a conversation with Cordis is worth having.
SENTRY · Preliminary Scan
Run it on your numbers.
Calibrated against thousands of lower-middle-market transactions. Two businesses with the same revenue can look completely different to a buyer.
Initializing scan...
SENTRY · Preliminary Exposure Scan · Partial Release
Exposure Dimensions · Initial Buyer Pass
Base Institutional Buyer · Lane 01 of 05
Zero-Cost Finding
SENTRY Identified · Actionable Regardless of Next Step
Buyer Lanes 02 to 05
Strategic, family office, PE add-on, search fund. Each models your business differently.
Requires
Full Scan
Full Scan
Outcome Distribution
P10 floor to P90 ceiling across all active buyer lanes. Where deals of your type actually close.
Requires
Full Scan
Full Scan
Retrade Probability
The specific probability a signed LOI gets repriced, by buyer type. Calibrated from transaction data.
Requires
Full Scan
Full Scan
Intervention Index
Every lever sequenced by EV recovered per estimated dollar spent. Three readiness horizons.
Requires
Full Scan
Full Scan
Preliminary Brief
A written interpretation of your scan — what each flagged dimension means in a buyer's hands, plus a second buyer lane rendered for comparison. The difference between how two buyer types read the same business is where your outcome distribution lives.
Your preliminary brief is on its way. Check your inbox within a few minutes. It arrives from a Cordis principal, not an automated system. If you have questions before then, reply directly.
What You Receive
An intelligence engagement.
Not a report.
Not a slide deck.
Not a report.
Not a slide deck.
The Cordis MRI is a structured engagement, not a document delivery. What you receive is intelligence built around your variables, your buyer universe, your diligence exposure. It is built to be used in conversations with your attorney, your accountant, your banker. In the decision about whether to act now or in twelve months. In the negotiation itself, when you already know what the buyer found before they tell you.
Market Readiness Intelligence · Cordis Group · March 2026
Apex Mechanical
Revenue
$12.4M
EBITDA
$2.4M
Margin
19.4%
SENTRY Score
61 / 100
Engagement: MRI-2026-014
Analyst: Cordis Group
Delivered: March 18, 2026
Classification: Confidential
Analyst: Cordis Group
Delivered: March 18, 2026
Classification: Confidential
Outcome Bands · EBITDA Multiple · Modeled Across Buyer Lanes
Base Institutional
4.5 to 6.0x
45 to 60% probability · Price-cut risk 44%
Competitive Process
5.8 to 7.2x
20 to 30% probability · Price-cut risk 16%
Strategic Premium
8.5 to 11.0x
5 to 15% probability · Price-cut risk 3%
This is a production MRI delivered to a real engagement. The company name and identifying details have been generalized for confidentiality. The simulation output, buyer-lane analysis, and intervention index are reproduced from the actual delivered report.
Engagement Case
The headline was $15.2M.
The cash at close was $7.9M.
Those are not the same number.
The cash at close was $7.9M.
Those are not the same number.
Apex Mechanical Services. Baltimore-DC corridor. $18.2M revenue. 22 years operating. 60% recurring contract revenue. EBITDA margin at exactly the institutional premium threshold. On paper, one of the strongest profiles in the lower-middle-market. In practice, $3.63M of the headline price was already structured into earnout, escrow, and working capital adjustments before a single diligence call.
Act I · What SENTRY Found
The founder had a strong business. He knew it. 22 years of operating history, a recurring maintenance contract book generating $400K annually, established GC relationships across the corridor. He had been approached by two PE platforms. Both made offers. Both structured the deal the same way: 52 to 65 cents of every dollar at close, the rest in earnout tied to milestones he could not control.
SENTRY modeled why. The business carried four distinct buyer-facing risks. None had been named or quantified. Each was being priced into structure separately. Together they accounted for $3.63M moving from cash to contingent proceeds. The founder was not being low-balled. He was being managed.
Proceeds at Risk · Today, Unprepared
$3.63M
Earnout, escrow and working capital adjustments structured into every offer received
This is not a negotiating position. It is the arithmetic output of four documented risk vectors SENTRY identified in the first pass.
Retrade Probability
32%
Probability of post-LOI price reduction
Derived from SBA transaction data for HVAC businesses without QoE documentation in this revenue band. The IBBA-reported range for comparable profiles: 28 to 38%.
Capital Certainty Score
61 / 100
Upper half of the market. Not the ceiling.
Score suppressed from 95+ by two named technician dependencies and a synchronized contract renewal window creating $7.5M in simultaneous quarterly exposure.
The Ratio
The engagement fee is the least expensive
line item in the deal.
line item in the deal.
A Tier I engagement costs $60,000. The average net proceeds swing from deal structure alone in the $5M to $15M revenue range is $600,000 to $2.4M. That is before retrade risk, misalignment discount, or buyer lane exclusion. The Apex engagement recovered $7.5M in median outcome on a $85K fee.
The MRI does not guarantee you recover that gap. It gives you the specific intelligence to know whether it exists, what is causing it, and what can still be addressed before any buyer sits across from you. For a founder facing the largest financial transaction of their life, that intelligence is not optional.
Tier I engagement fee
$60K
Avg. proceeds swing (deal structure alone)
$600K–$2.4M
Minimum return on intelligence
10×
Apex engagement · $85K fee
88×
$7.5M median outcome shift on $85K engagement fee
The buyer already has
a model for your business.
a model for your business.
Now you can too.
An MRI engagement begins with a document submission. No discovery call. No pitch. You submit your financials, we confirm the input lock with you, and within four to six weeks you have the most precise picture of your transaction position available to any founder in the lower-middle-market. The process does not begin until you are ready. When it does, it runs on your timeline.
Submit your financials to begin. No discovery call. No pitch. Document submission takes fifteen minutes. Within four to six weeks you will have the most precise picture of your transaction position available to any founder in the lower-middle-market.
Begin Your Engagement
Current delivery window: 21 business days from document receipt · Engagements accepted on a rolling basis
The MRI is an independent diagnostic engagement. Not tied to a transaction mandate, a listing agreement, or a success fee.
The analysis is yours to keep and act on with any advisor, on any timeline.
The MRI is an independent diagnostic engagement. Not tied to a transaction mandate, a listing agreement, or a success fee.
The analysis is yours to keep and act on with any advisor, on any timeline.
The founders who get the most from this engagement are the ones
who already suspected something was off.
If that is you, you are ready.
who already suspected something was off.
If that is you, you are ready.