A corporate finance consultant is the person a business hires for the transactions it does rarely and the counterparty does daily: raising money, buying a company, selling one, restructuring the balance sheet. The asymmetry is the whole point — the private equity fund across the table has done a hundred deals, the founder is doing their first — and the consultant's job is to remove that disadvantage: preparing the business, running the process, testing the numbers and negotiating the terms that outlast the handshake. Here is what the role covers, who does it, and how to choose one without paying investment-banking fees for accountancy work (or vice versa).
The work, deal by deal
Sell-side — the flagship: valuation and exit readiness (often a year or more before market), preparing the information pack, building a competitive buyer process, managing diligence, and negotiating structure — the earn-outs, completion mechanics and equity bridges where headline prices quietly move. Buy-side: target search and approach, valuation discipline (the consultant's most valuable sentence is often "walk away"), due diligence, and funding the purchase. Fundraising: debt and equity — the forecast that survives credit committee, the term-sheet comparison, the covenant negotiation whose value shows up three years later in the downturn. Restructuring and special situations: refinancing under pressure, demergers, MBOs and shareholder reorganisations. The common core across all four: independent numbers, process control, and a negotiator whose incentives are aligned with yours rather than with the deal simply happening.
Who provides it — and the fee logic
The market has three tiers. Investment banks and dedicated M&A boutiques dominate deals from the tens of millions up, priced on retainers plus success fees of low single-digit percentages. Accountancy-firm corporate finance teams — our tier — serve the owner-managed and mid-market space, typically with lighter retainers, success elements on transactions, and project fees for discrete work like valuations and diligence; the structural advantage is integration, since the tax structuring, the diligence and the deal advice come from people who can see the same numbers. Brokers and listing services occupy the volume end — wide marketing, thin advice — appropriate for simple businesses, dangerous for complicated ones. On fees, the honest guidance is to interrogate alignment rather than headline rates: a pure success fee motivates closing any deal; a pure retainer motivates neither; the blends exist because both failure modes are real. And insist the engagement letter defines what "transaction value" means before a percentage attaches to it — debt, earn-outs and rolled equity have funded many fee disputes.
When to engage one — and when not to
The trigger points where the fee reliably earns out: any sale process (solo negotiations with a single buyer close at solo prices); any raise beyond your existing bank relationship; any acquisition where the seller is advised and you are not; and distress, early — the options at eleven months of runway are wider than at three. The engagements to skip: hiring deal advisers to validate a decision already made, buying a sale process for a business two years short of ready (buy the readiness work instead — it moves the price more), and any adviser whose valuation pitch is conspicuously the highest in the room, since flattery at pitch becomes price-chipping at diligence. Timing matters more than most owners allow: the best corporate finance engagements start twelve to twenty-four months before the transaction, when structure, tax and presentation can still be shaped rather than defended.
Choosing well
Ask for deals like yours — sector, size, structure — and speak to the principals they acted for; confirm who runs your deal day-to-day; test their view of your weaknesses at pitch (an adviser who sees none has not looked); and check the machinery behind the front person — modelling, tax, diligence — because mid-market deals are won in the workstreams. Acumon's corporate finance practice runs sales, acquisitions, MBOs, valuations and due diligence for owner-managed and mid-market businesses, with the tax and accounting integration that is this tier's genuine edge. The first meeting — what the business is worth, what a process would look like, whether now is the time — costs nothing and settles most of the question.