Sell side advisory is the business of running a process for an owner who has decided to sell, and the value the adviser adds is almost entirely competitive tension: more credible buyers, better informed, moving on the same timetable. Everything the adviser owes flows from that. This page sets out the five obligations, what the engagement pays, and where a process most often loses the tension it exists to create.
Obligation one: a list wider than the client would have made
Owners know their competitors and their customers. They rarely know the financial buyers, the adjacent strategics or the overseas acquirer who has been looking at the sector for two years. A list that is only the names the client could have written down is a list that has added nothing, and it is the most common quiet failure in a mandate.
Obligation two: materials that survive a sceptical read
The CIM has to answer the questions a buyer would otherwise ask on a call, which is what compresses the timetable. On this site's arithmetic that document is 121.2 hours and $11,514 of adviser time before anybody reads it, and cutting it short is a false economy paid back in weeks of question-and-answer.
Obligation three: keeping the process on one clock
Competitive tension exists only if buyers believe others are moving at the same pace. That belief is maintained by deadlines that are held, and it evaporates the first time one is quietly extended for one party. Managing the calendar is not administration here; it is the product.
Obligations four and five: diligence and the close
After LOI the adviser is largely managing a request list and a seller who still has a business to run. Chasing 68.4 open requests over six weeks is 164.16 hours on the worked example, and the close then depends on somebody owning the transition services the seller has agreed to keep running afterwards.
Questions people ask about sell side advisory
What does sell side advisory pay?
A retainer plus a success fee. On the worked example here that is $112,500 of retainers and $600,000 at close, $712,500 in total.
What does the adviser actually add?
Competitive tension: more credible buyers, better informed, on one clock. Everything else in the mandate exists to produce that.
Where do sell side processes lose value?
A list no wider than the client's own, and a timetable that slips for one party. Both dissolve the tension the process depends on.