Meridian Deal Partners · Boutique Origination Desk
It belongs to an owner who has not decided to sell, has never spoken to a banker, and will not appear in a process you are invited to. We reach those owners, do the work that would otherwise sit with your team, and put a small number of qualified situations in front of you.
Engagements
There is no lock-up and no notice period — an engagement runs month to month and ends when you say so. The mandate call and the first memo are free, whichever line you end up on.
Entry
$2,500 / month
For firms taking the measure of the work before they engage a desk.
The working desk
$15,000 / month
A desk working your mandate: finding situations, testing them, and writing up the ones that hold.
Principal desk
$25,000 / month
Everything above, and we make the approach in your name.
Measured against building it inside
Firms that have built this in-house know the number. A research analyst with the data subscriptions, the screening discipline and the time to chase a thesis runs to something like three hundred thousand dollars a year, before the data itself. It buys one person's attention and one person's judgment, and it stops when they take leave.
What sits here instead
A named mandate holder and the analyst bench behind them. The screened universes below. The dependency graph. A second reader on every memo.
The comparison was never really about price. It is about what one person can hold in a week.
Where a party we surfaced goes on to transact and a transaction fee is appropriate, it is payable by you, agreed in writing beforehand, and the retainer is credited against it.
What this is
Nobody wins a private transaction by holding a better view on the index. Almost everything that reaches an acquirer has already reached everyone else — a banker, a deadline, a room of other buyers. The advantage sits earlier, in seven things that are not written down anywhere.
The filings, licensed records and market data are available to anyone who pays for them, and on their own they are a list. The work is everything after: thousands of operators screened against ownership, size, structure and succession until a few dozen are worth a conversation, and those approached directly rather than waited on. What reaches you is what survived that — not the source, and not a list someone else is holding at the same time.
An origination is attributed to the mandate it cleared, and to that mandate alone. We do not put the same situation in front of three buyers and let them settle it between themselves. It is also why we hold a small number of mandates at a time.
Meridian OS
The desk is people. Meridian OS is where what they do arrives — the mandate as we understood it, what we screened against it, and every situation with the reasoning attached.
Screened against your mandate
Precision machining — Mid-Atlantic
1,180 operators in the universe · 34 clearing the size and ownership screen · 3 carried forward this cycle
Every figure carries its source. Rejections are kept with their reason, because the ones you do not see are the ones you are paying us to remove.
A representative workspace. Live workspaces are private to the engaged firm.
A named mandate holder who owns your written mandate and takes your call. An analyst bench that reads the filings, builds the target list, makes the approaches and writes the memos. A second reader on every memo before it reaches you.
The technology consolidates those records into something a person can work with. It decides nothing about what you see.
Access is issued on engagement, private to your firm.
The rhythm
Buy-boxes move as the market does. The engagement is built around the conversations that keep the screen pointed at what you want this quarter.
A working review with your mandate holder. What cleared, what was set aside and why, and what you would have weighed differently. Most of the value is in the second half — the screen tightens against your reactions, not against a specification written once.
A re-point. A deliberate look at whether the mandate still describes the firm. Sectors get added, size bands move, a thesis closes. Anything material changes the universe we are running against.
Out of cycle. A new thesis, a portfolio company needing add-ons, a corridor opening. You do not wait for the calendar; the desk re-points on the call.
The framework
A thesis names an industry. The MEDG asks what that industry cannot operate without — and who owns it.
It is the standing map every mandate is run against, and the reason a screen returns businesses no process has touched. Bring a thesis to the mandate call and we will show you where we believe its dependencies sit.
First order
Where every buyer looks, and every process is already running.
Second order
Inputs, components, specialised services and the operators holding them. Rarely bid for, and rarely for sale.
Third order
Single-source supply, permits, sites and licences. Small, old, privately held, and available to a buyer who arrives first.
Coverage
A mandate in these areas starts against a screened population rather than a blank page, at the level where ownership, succession and readiness can be assessed.
Machinery · fabricated metal products · electrical and electronic manufacturing · wood products and millwork · building materials and concrete · specialty coatings
Dental and orthodontic groups · multi-site clinics · diagnostics laboratories · home care · post-acute and skilled nursing · behavioural health · veterinary
Oil and gas services · renewables · water · utilities · power and data-centre land · mining and metals
Specialty durable-goods distribution · truck transportation · warehousing and storage · industrial logistics real estate
Commercial HVAC and mechanical contracting · industrial repair and maintenance · facilities and grounds · specialty construction trades
Primary agriculture · agricultural manufacturing and processing · food production · cold chain and storage
Gulf and GCC
Sovereign funds, state holding companies, investment corporations and the family-office layer around them across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain — together with the advisers and platforms through which that capital is normally reached.
North America and Europe
Registered advisers, multi-family offices, independent sponsors, private credit funds and special-situations desks, mapped from the registration and holdings record rather than a bought list.
The co-investment graph
Positions taken together, traced out of the public record, so an approach can be made where a precedent already exists rather than cold. It is the difference between a plausible introduction and a well-founded one.
Selected mandates
The work is specific to each one, so we hold a small number at a time. Not every enquiry becomes a mandate — where there is no universe built and no route to the owners, we would rather say so than take the retainer. It is worth knowing early which side yours falls on.
A mandate starts warm in: industrials and machinery · healthcare services · energy, water and resources · distribution and logistics · building and facilities services · agriculture and food. On the capital side, Gulf and GCC institutions and the North American and European allocator universe. Outside these we will build the universe first, and say so before you are billed for it.
The mandate call
Not a sample mandate and not a generic list. Tell us the acquisition you are trying to make this year, and the first memo will be written against that one. It costs nothing and you keep it either way.
The call
What you buy, what you would never look at, and what would end a conversation in week three. We write the mandate up as we understood it and send it back for your correction before a single name is screened.
The first memo
A real situation against your mandate — the owner, the business, and the numbers we could stand behind and the ones we could not. Written to the standard every memo is written to, because there is no point showing you a better one than you would receive.
Then you decide
If the standard is not better than what your own team would have produced, there is nothing to discuss and we will not ask twice. If it is, the engagement starts the following week and the desk picks up the mandate as written.
On discretion: we approach owners in our own name, on our own paper. You are not identified to a counterparty, and neither is your thesis, until you decide otherwise.
Book the mandate callOr write to partners@meridiandealpartner.com with the thesis in two lines — we answer the same day.
If we are not the right desk for what you are trying to buy, we will say so on the call. We would rather decline a mandate than carry one we cannot source against.