Insights
Engagement examples, and one brief laid out in full.
A target screen that focuses a pitch. A peer benchmark that shows which value-creation levers to test. A risk assessment that directs the next round of due diligence.
Anonymized engagements
Research used in real work.
Anonymized examples of delivered research, and what the teams did with it.
140 → 12
An advisory firm ranked ~140 organizations into a ~12-target priority shortlist.
Pilot → annual
An institutional investor expanded from a pilot to an annual engagement.
Borrower-level
Outside-in, source-linked value scans across a direct lender's loan book — built without internal borrower data.
Portfolio-wide
Source-linked ESG, climate, and risk screening across an institutional investor's portfolio — issuer by issuer.
Site-by-site
Outside-in financial models for energy and industrial assets — built without internal company data.
Peer-benchmarked
A leading life & health insurer's benchmarking, delivered against a defensible peer set — every comparison source-linked.
Macro → issuer
Repeatable decarbonization and physical-risk screening across a portfolio, every rating source-linked.
Research experience
From the work.
Patterns our research has surfaced, anonymized. They describe what we found, not results we claim for clients.
Markets and growth
In one retail valuation, about half the value the share price implied sat in margins and asset efficiency, not new stores.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
Apparel profit is splitting two ways: toward brand-led premium and direct-to-consumer players, and toward scale-led, high-volume ones.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
A telecom benchmark turned acquisitions into rules: an explicit payback threshold and variance band decided go or no-go.
Research experience · Technology & telecoms
In one national market, domestic drug manufacturing met under a tenth of drug spending, with a skilled-worker shortage ahead.
Research experience
Performance and cash
Most trapped cash comes out through three levers: collect faster, pay slower and hold less.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
Speed can be the asset: one food processor turned its inventory many times faster than its industry, and a few days less stock was worth millions in cash.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
A metals distributor’s working-capital program closed the gap to its peers on both collection days and inventory days.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
Margins and returns can disagree: a company can post top-quartile margins and bottom-quartile returns on investment.
Research experience
Risk and climate
Supply-chain emissions usually dwarf a company’s own: in one agri-food case they ran about fifty times its on-site emissions.
Research experience
In sustainable finance, traceability data, not membership claims, decides who qualifies.
Research experience · Financial services
At one utility, the electric business earned just over half the revenue but produced almost all of the direct emissions.
Research experience · Energy & utilities
Public sector
A municipal asset plan holds up only when its levels of service rest on recent, verifiable data.
Research experience · Public sector
How we work
We map a process before we price it: the trigger, the inputs, the steps and handoffs, where they break, and who uses the output.
Research experience · Advisory & professional services
About half of requests are for a working spreadsheet, model or slide deck rather than a written report, so we deliver in the format the team already uses.
Research experience · Advisory & professional services
Illustrative output
Follow the question through to the brief.
From a question to a useful next step.
A performance diagnostic brings the findings, the reasoning and the next questions together.
Illustrative brief. Fictional example; the format is real.
Where should management investigate cash tied up in operations?
- Research question
- Compare inventory turnover and working capital with peers, allowing for differences in business mix.
- Finding
- Inventory is growing faster than sales, and faster than at comparable peers. The growth is concentrated in slower-moving categories rather than in lines that support demand.
- Evidence
- Peer comparison built from annual filings and investor presentations. Where a peer reports inventory on a different basis, the difference is flagged, not adjusted away.
- Confidence
- Partial. Segment-level inventory is not disclosed by every peer.
- Priority for review
- Test the pattern against SKU-level inventory, seasonality and purchasing commitments before choosing an action.
- Open question for management
- Which categories account for the growth in stock?
The blog
Ideas from the research team.
Explore our published perspectives on business research, investment analysis and the decisions behind the work.
Start with one question
Bring us the question behind your next decision.
Tell us what you’re investigating and when you need an answer. We’ll discuss the scope, inputs and research that would help.