Meridian Deal Partners · 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 properly this sits against a research hire — an analyst with the databases, the screening discipline and the time to chase a thesis costs a firm around three hundred thousand dollars a year. Where a party we surfaced goes on to transact and a transaction fee is appropriate, the terms are agreed in writing beforehand and the retainer is credited against it.
What this is
Almost everything that reaches an acquirer has already reached everyone else. It arrives with a banker, a deadline, and a room of other buyers. We work in the other direction. We begin from your mandate, approach owners directly, and bring you situations that exist because we went and found them.
Nothing we send you comes off a list, out of a circulation, or through a platform. It comes from an owner we approached, in a conversation we opened, against a thesis you gave us. That is the only kind of flow worth paying a desk for.
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.
MEDG
Knowing to go direct is not the hard part. Knowing where to go is. The MEDG is a standing map of what sectors actually rest on — inputs, suppliers, single points of failure, and the businesses that sit one or two levels beneath the obvious position. We maintain it, and we run a mandate against it.
It asks a different question. Not who competes in a sector, but what that sector cannot operate without, and who owns it. The answer is often a smaller, older, privately held business that no process has ever touched — which is precisely why it is still available to a buyer who arrives first.
Bring a thesis to the mandate call and we will tell you where we think its dependencies sit.
Meridian OS
The desk is people. Meridian OS is where what they do arrives — the mandate as we have 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 a very large body of public and licensed records into something a person can work with. It decides nothing about what you see.
Access is issued on engagement and is 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 actually want this quarter.
The mandate call. Twenty minutes to capture what you deploy into and, more usefully, what you will never look at. We write it up and send it back for correction before a single name is screened.
A working review with your mandate holder. What cleared, what was set aside and why, what you would have wanted us to weigh differently. Most of the value is in the second half of that conversation — 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.
Selected mandates
The work is specific to each one, so we hold a small number at a time and are deliberate about which. It is worth knowing early whether yours is one of them.
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, the numbers we could stand behind and the ones we could not, and what we set aside and why. 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.
And 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.