For owners doing $1M or more in earnings

Want to protect your biggest asset?

You run a successful business, which means an offer could come any day. The owners who know their number, know their buyer, and know how to defend both can walk away with 3 to 5 times more.

I'm ready to protect my business →

Free. 8 questions, 10 minutes. We don't ask for your phone number.

Why the same business has more than one number

Two things decide it. Neither one is luck.

Same business. Same earnings. Same year. Sell it to five different kinds of buyer and five very different numbers come back. The distance between the smallest one and the biggest one comes down to two things, and both of them are yours.

Looking at the business the way a buyer looks at it

The first thing

How ready you are

What a buyer finds when he finally looks. Whether the place runs without you. Whether your books hold up. Whether your customers are on paper or on a handshake. You can sort most of this out yourself, and you already know half the answers.

The second thing

Who's buying

One kind of buyer pays extra for your biggest customer. Another kind takes money off for that exact same customer. Nothing about your business changed. Your check changed by millions. This one you can't work out from your kitchen table.

I'm ready to protect my business → Free. 8 questions, 10 minutes. We don't ask for your phone number.

A real one · Details changed, numbers didn't

The offer said $15.2 million.
The check said $7.9 million.

An HVAC company outside Baltimore. $18.2 million in revenue, 22 years old, a steady book of service contracts, good relationships with the builders he worked for. One of the best shops you'd see at that size. Two buyers made offers. Both offers were built the same way.

Nobody lied to him. Nobody low-balled him. Four things about his business had never been said out loud. Every buyer had already found all four and quietly taken money off for each one. Not off the big number on the front page. Off the part nobody reads.

01Two of his techs knew everything. So every buyer said he'd get part of the money later, and only if those two men stayed.

02Every service contract came up for renewal in the same three months. $7.5 million riding on one page of the calendar. So the buyer held money back until they all renewed.

03Nobody had put a number on his trucks. So the buyer did, on the last day, when there was no room left to argue.

04He couldn't prove on paper that he did more than one trade. So he looked like a subcontractor instead of a real company, and the buyers who pay the most never showed up.

Not one of those four was a problem with his business. Every one of them could have been fixed, and every one of them could have been fixed before anybody called. That's the whole reason this page exists.

Inside Own the Decision + Defend the Number

The conversations nobody prepared you for.

Most owners never start because of one thought: if my key guy finds out, he walks, and then I've got nothing to sell. That fear has cost more money than any spreadsheet ever did.

Telling your key people. What to say, when, and in what order.
Telling your spouse and your family. The one nobody rehearses.
Your deal team. Who you need, and who actually works for you.
Holding your number when the offer quietly shrinks.

See what's inside →

The Book · The whole method

Think Like a Buyer

The Off-Market Method

Whether you sell or never sell, the offer is coming. This is how every ordinary decision in your business builds value on purpose, so you meet that offer ready instead of flat-footed. Protect the asset. Defend the number. Own the decision.

Read chapter one free

Straight answers

Before you ask.

What's the catch?

There isn't one, and here's the honest math. We give this away because owners who think this way make sharper decisions, and a handful of them, someday, want us in the room when it's real. Most of you never will. That's fine. The tools work either way, and they're yours to keep and use with any advisor you like. That's the whole trade, and we'd rather say it out loud than have you wonder.

Why won't you just tell me what my business is worth?

Because we can't, and neither can anyone else who'd do it from a few questions. We could put a number on this page. Every tool like this does. You'd carry that number into a room one day and it would cost you real money. What we can show you honestly is where you stand on the two things that decide your number, scored, from your own answers. That part is real. What it's worth in dollars needs your financials and your market, and it isn't free.

Are you going to call me?

No. We never ask for your phone number, and you won't get one from us. You'll get an email with what you asked for. If you want to talk to a human, that's your decision to make, not ours. And if you do, we're here, and it's complimentary.

Have us do it · The Cordis MRI

We model what buyers will see, before they see it.

The tools are yours to run on your own. When you want the truth about your business instead of the truth about businesses like yours, that's the Cordis MRI. The big buyers run this exact analysis on you before they call. We run it for you first.

This one isn't for everyone.

We take a limited number each month, and that limit is real, not a sales tactic. If that's not you yet, start with the tools above. They'll get you most of the way for a fraction of the cost, and every hour you put in there still counts when you come back to this.

See if you fit →

How this works

You send your financials. We show you exactly what the analysis is built on and you sign off on it before anything runs, so there are no black boxes and nothing to argue about later. Then we do the work. You get one deliverable, and it's yours to keep.

Market Mapping

Who would actually buy your company, how they act, and what they pay. We throw out the ones who don't fit, and you pick which buyers we look at before we run a single number.

Retrade Rehearsal

We run your sale 10,000 times against each kind of buyer. You see exactly where they'd push back, what it would cost you, and what you'd actually take home from each one.

Intervention Index

Every fix ranked by what it pays back per dollar you spend, today, in six months, and in twelve. You know which ones are worth doing and which ones aren't.

Not tied to a mandate, a listing agreement, or a success fee. The analysis is yours to use with any advisor, on any timeline.

What's underneath all of it

This isn't opinion. It's records.

Every tool on this page is built on the same records the Cordis MRI runs on. Not war stories. Not what somebody heard at a conference. Real records of what businesses like yours sold for, and what got taken back out before the check cleared.

SBA Loan Records

Every SBA-backed sale is public record. What the bank thought the place was really worth.

SEC Filings

What buyers have to report after they buy somebody.

PitchBook

Who's buying right now, and how fast.

GF Data

What businesses your size actually sold for, updated every quarter.

TagniFi

What companies like yours were bought and sold for, line by line.

Cordis Deals

What we've watched happen, one deal at a time.

Who built this

Ron Smith

“I grew up in my family's HVAC business. My parents, my sister, and my brother-in-law still run it.”

That isn't a line for a website. It's why this page exists. I know what it looks like when a family spends twenty-five years building something real. I also know what happens when they sit down across from a man who has done this hundreds of times and already had their business figured out before he walked in the door. Nobody at that table knows the same amount, and it's never the owner who knows more.

After a decade on Wall Street, I've spent my career on the owner's side of that table. More than a hundred founder and family owned businesses, through the handoff. That's what Cordis does. We're not brokers and we're not a listing shop. We tell you what a buyer is going to find, before he finds it.

The Gap Table ran in Forbes. The Misalignment Tax ran in Fast Company. The research underneath both is published and public, not borrowed from somebody else's conference talk.

Off-Market is where I give the work away. Owners who think this way make sharper decisions, and a few of them, someday, want us in the room. That's the whole trade.

Founding PartnerCordis Group

Editor-in-ChiefCordis Institute

10+ yearsOn Wall Street

$5M to $250MThe size of business we work with

Forbes · Fast CompanyPublished, with the links to prove it

100+ businessesFounder and family owned, through ownership transitions

Want to protect your biggest asset?