Every corporate finance decision, stripped of the narrative wrapped around it, reduces to a small set of hard questions: what is this worth, what will it be worth under different owners, and what has to be true about the business for either number to hold. The answers are not found in the model. They are found in the contracts, the customer concentration, the working capital cycle, the systems that actually run the plant. Good transaction work begins where the spreadsheet ends — in the operating reality the numbers are meant to describe.
Sterling Birchmond's Corporate Finance & Transaction Support practice works with management teams, boards, sponsors, and strategic buyers on valuation and financial modeling, buy-side and sell-side M&A support, financial due diligence, and post-merger integration. The work is sharpened by the firm's other practices — integration plans informed by operating experience on the factory floor, diligence conducted by people who can read the ERP and the general ledger with equal fluency.
The analytical core of the practice. Strategic framing, defensible valuation, and the diligence work that determines whether a deal thesis survives contact with the target's books.
Strategic questions that precede a transaction — whether to buy, sell, divest, or hold; what the portfolio should look like in three years; which segments earn their cost of capital and which quietly consume it. The work is structured, evidence-led, and written for the people actually making the call.
Discounted cash flow, LBO, trading comparables, and precedent transaction analyses — built to withstand scrutiny from the other side of the table. Bespoke operating models that tie revenue drivers to unit economics, capex schedules, and working capital mechanics, structured so sensitivities can be run in the room rather than promised in a follow-up.
Quality-of-earnings work that separates recurring performance from the one-time items dressed to look like it. Normalized working capital analyses, net debt and debt-like item identification, and the valuation bridge — cataloguing every adjustment between headline EBITDA and the number a buyer is actually purchasing. Findings documented in a form the deal team can negotiate against.
Live-deal execution. Running — or sitting alongside — the processes where terms are shaped, price is defended, and the operating company either inherits value or loses it in the handoff.
Full buy-side and sell-side engagements. Target and buyer identification; commercial and financial diligence; bid structuring, deal mechanics, and negotiation support; board and investment committee materials drafted for the audience that will actually read them. Staffing is deliberately small and senior — typically a partner-led team working in close proximity to the internal deal team, never layered between it and the counterparty, and never so thinly resourced that the analytical work is outsourced to junior hands.
Integration is where transaction theses are validated or quietly abandoned. Pre-close planning — operating model design, Day-One readiness, a synergy program tied to line items in the model rather than a slide. Post-close execution oversight, with function-by-function sequencing across commercial, operations, finance, and IT, and a governance cadence that surfaces slippage early. Integration work in this practice is informed by the firm's operations and systems capabilities, because integration is mostly an operating problem wearing a finance suit.
Most engagements start with a specific pressure. An unsolicited bid has landed on the CEO's desk and the board meets in three weeks. A capital structure needs to be revisited before a refinancing window closes. A sponsor is preparing a portfolio company for exit and the equity story has to hold. A founder is weighing an offer and wants a valuation that is honest rather than flattering. A diligence finding is about to move the price. The firm takes on a limited number of engagements at a time, by design. Conversations begin in confidence.
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