Rowe | Tomes Advisors runs sell-side M&A processes for founders and owners in the lower-middle market, typically on transactions between $25M and $150M in enterprise value. Their clients are usually selling the company they built once, and they expect two things that normally pull in opposite directions: institutional-grade materials and speed to market.
The firm's reputation was built on quality. The constraint was the calendar.
The challenge
Sell-side production forced a choice on every mandate. A polished Confidential Information Memorandum meant weeks of reading the data room, reconciling financials, building the narrative, and formatting the deck. Tailoring that story for strategic versus financial buyers added more time on top.
That timeline had real cost. In a live process, extra weeks of prep are weeks in which a key customer can churn, a comparable deal can reprice the sector, or a motivated buyer can lose momentum. And because each mandate absorbed most of the team, the firm could realistically run only one process at a time.
"The market doesn't wait for your CIM to be ready. We needed to move faster without ever putting weaker materials in front of a buyer." — Tyler Kavanaugh
What changed
Deliverables AI let Rowe | Tomes compress the slowest steps of production without cutting corners on quality.
1. A first CIM draft within a day
On a recent industrial-services mandate (Project Ashford), the seller delivered a several-hundred-page data room. Using CIM, the team had a complete, source-grounded first draft — transaction overview, executive summary, investment highlights, company/market/customer sections, and financials — on their screens the next day, rendered in the firm's house style with every figure cited back to the underlying document. From there it was editing, not building from scratch.
2. Buyer-specific narratives
Buyer List built and prioritized the acquirer universe, separating strategics from financial sponsors with fit rationale for each. The team then re-angled the CIM narrative for different buyer types — an operational-synergy story for strategics, a platform-and-growth story for sponsors — in hours rather than days.
3. Diligence organized from day one
DD Checklist generated a tailored, sector-specific request list and tracked outstanding items, so the data room was buyer-ready and gaps were flagged early. Deal Tracker kept every workstream, deadline, and action item visible across the process.
4. The teaser out the same week
Teaser produced the anonymized one-pager for first contact the same week the mandate signed.
By the numbers
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| End-to-end sell-side package | baseline | ~30% faster |
| First CIM draft from a fresh data room | days of reading | next day |
| Buyer-specific narrative variants | 1 (time permitting) | 3, in hours |
| Concurrent live mandates per team | 1 | ~1–2 |
| Figures manually re-keyed into the CIM | many | ~0 (cited from source) |
The result
By collapsing the slowest steps — the first CIM draft and the per-buyer re-angling — Rowe | Tomes shortened its end-to-end sell-side package by roughly 30%, with materials that are stronger, not weaker: every number traceable to the data room, every buyer receiving a narrative built for them. The recovered time let the same team carry about 30% more deal capacity, taking on a second mandate in parallel during busy stretches without adding headcount.
For Rowe | Tomes, the old trade-off has eased. They move faster and hold the quality bar — and in a live sell-side process, that combination is what protects the client's outcome.