For generations of sell-side investment bankers, the playbook has gone largely unquestioned. Big firms hire armies of analysts and associates fresh out of business school who then churn through spreadsheets late into the night, normalizing financials, running comps, and drafting pages of Confidential Information Memorandums (CIMs). Their output is packaged and delivered as the final work product on behalf of their clients with little application of industry insight or big picture thinking.
The model is efficient. It’s scalable. But it’s broken.
Large investment banks and their methodologies tend to prioritize volume over value. Senior bankers rarely touch the real work of understanding a company. Their careers have been built on finance, not on building or leading the kinds of companies they now claim to value, and their organizations are built on the labor of entry level colleagues lacking industry knowledge and context. A truly strategic acquisition is worth a lot more than a financial acquisition but without understanding the target’s capabilities and population of strategically matched buyers who could leverage them, the GTM positioning often misses the value proposition entirely.
This is why so many deals feel transactional. Sellers come away believing their uniqueness was never truly understood. Buyers discover post-close that the promised synergies exist more in theory than in practice. The disconnect stems not from the math, but from the lack of truly strategic matchmaking. Many firms are never going to be very strategic targets, regardless of the buyer or market positioning. However, for the ones that can be, advisors should recognize this and improve their clients chances of receiving a premium valuation.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Imagine instead a model where those guiding a transaction have actually lived in the industries they advise: AdTech, MarTech, SaaS, and services. People who have been in the operator’s chair, who have delivered the services, built client relationships, navigated market shifts, and know what it takes to scale. Advisors who can see not only a company’s numbers, but its levers, needs and growth potential.
This is more than nuance. It is the difference between a transaction that works on paper and one that works in reality. Traditional investment banks will argue that their models produce results; and in many cases, they do. But the question is: results for whom? The large firms thrive on volume – built on a foundation focused on the number of transactions completed, not the mutual value created. Their business model is built on speed and scale, not depth and understanding. And when your goal is to push as many deals across the finish line as possible, you inevitably sacrifice the knowledge, humanity and humility that every transformative transaction requires.
For founders, a sale often represents the culmination of decades of effort, risk, and sacrifice. For buyers, a thoughtful acquisition can serve the strategic direction for years to come. These are not routine events. They are life-changing moments. And they demand more than a spreadsheet.
This divide presents an opportunity for advisors like Bravery to help potentially strategic acquisition targets capture some of this worth via an appropriate market positioning and articulation of the opportunities available to the right-matched buyer. We believe transactions should be shaped by advisors who understand what represents real value and how to unlock it.
It’s time for change. Transactions deserve more than efficiency. They deserve clarity. They deserve advisors who can see beyond the numbers to the unique attributes of value on both sides of the table.
The future of M&A can either be measured by the number of transactions completed, or by the depth of understanding that makes any single transaction an enduring success.
To learn more, you can reach the author, Bob Morris, Managing Partner at bob.morris@bravery.group.
