Your CIM tells the story. The IRA carries the institutional weight your CIM can’t.

Your seller’s numbers, held to the buyer’s QoE standard — before the buyer sees them

The single largest retrade trigger is the gap between the adjusted EBITDA in your book and what survives the buyer’s quality-of-earnings review. Capital Refinery closes that gap by grading the seller’s financials with the same enforcement engine the buyer’s IC runs: every figure is traceable to a source document, recorded as a contradiction between sources, or honestly absent — never invented — and internally contradictory numbers (a stored ratio that doesn’t equal its components, a coverage ratio that’s mathematically impossible) are refused at the source rather than patched in diligence. When a buyer’s IC catches one unsourced number, the whole book loses credibility; here, the standard holds before the data room opens — enforced by a release gate that can’t pass by dropping a failing check. You fail it in private before a buyer fails you in public.

Where the IRA lands across the mandate cycle

The IRA isn’t a replacement for any part of the banker’s workflow — it’s a layer underneath. The engine output is the institutional-grade evidence layer; the banker remains the deal-runner.

1. Target screening — which inbounds become mandates

A sell-side banker fields 40–80 inbound conversations a year; a small share become signed mandates. The $750 Self-Assessment is a pre-mandate screening tool: an operator who runs the SA produces an attested 4-page memo that names the structural blockers an institutional buyer would surface. Bankers reading the SA can triage faster — businesses with Self-Assessed verdict at Institutional Ready (rare) versus those still 9–12 months from going to market. The economics: the operator pays $750; the banker saves several hours of unpaid pre-mandate diligence on every prospect.

2. Mandate prep — what gets done before the CIM is drafted

The 60–90 days between mandate signing and CIM distribution is where most of the unrecoverable diligence prep happens. A Readiness Gap Review ($4,500, 5 business days) or a full IRA at mandate signing accelerates the work — named blockers prioritized by severity, partner-handoff brief that recommends adjacent consultants for governance / financial reconciliation / operations workstreams. The banker’s mandate-prep work compresses on the structural portion because the blockers are documented upstream rather than discovered during data-room population.

3. Buyer outreach — what travels with the teaser

The IRA-attested artifact travels with the teaser. A sophisticated buyer reviewing 30 teasers a week is more likely to engage with one carrying a fingerprinted institutional-readiness artifact — especially when the buyer’s IC uses the same engine internally on portfolio companies. The artifact does what a CIM cannot: independently verify the seller’s representations against a deterministic framework.

4. Diligence support — what compresses buyer-side QoE

Once an LOI is signed, buyer-side QoE typically runs 60–90 days at $150–400K. A meaningful share of that work is structural — financial reconciliation, KPI definition validation, governance review, customer concentration verification. The IRA documents those structural answers upstream. The buyer’s QoE still runs (it’s buy-side risk management, not a duplicate of seller-side prep) — but the structural questions resolve faster, freeing buy-side capacity for the deal-specific questions that drive value or kill it.

5. Post-LOI fall-through reduction — what kills deals before close

IBBA Market Pulse and middle-market M&A research consistently document material LOI-to-close fall-through rates — surprise findings during diligence are the dominant cause. The IRA surfaces structural surprises upstream, before the seller signs an exclusivity period. A banker whose mandate book carries a meaningfully lower post-LOI fall-through rate compounds reputation and repeat-mandate flow over time.

What the IRA does that a CIM cannot

The CIM is a marketing document. It tells the story the seller wants told. The IRA is engine output graded against firm-policy thresholds, with a deterministic fingerprint and a public verification URL. The two artifacts do different jobs.

• →Deterministic fingerprint — every IRA export carries a cryptographic hash linking the artifact to the engine state at issuance. A buyer can confirm independently that the document wasn't edited after generation.
• →Public verification URL — a banker (or seller, or buyer) can resolve the IRA token at /p/ira/<token> and view the engine output, with no login required and no SaaS dependency.
• →Same engine the buyer's IC uses — the IRA grades against the same 10-axis framework that buy-side ICs apply when underwriting acquisitions. The artifact's evidence basis is the structure the buyer is going to apply anyway.
• →Refusal discipline — the engine refuses to grade things it cannot observe (sentiment, management communication style, narrative coherence). A CIM presents polish as evidence; the IRA refuses polish as a graded input. That refusal is what makes the artifact credible to sophisticated reviewers.
• →Named blockers with remediation language — not 'consider improving recall completion' but 'recall completion 71% vs acquirer threshold 85%+; remediation horizon 4–6 months of recall-system overhaul.' The artifact reads as institutional evidence, not coaching.

Outcomes the IRA produces for bankers

• →Mandate-pitch competitive advantage — a target the operator has pre-IRA'd shows the banker arrived with structural preparation the competing banker hasn't done
• →Mandate-prep compression — the structural portion of pre-CIM diligence is documented upstream instead of discovered during data-room population
• →Buyer-side QoE compression — the structural questions are pre-answered against the same standard the buyer's IC applies, freeing buy-side capacity for deal-specific work
• →Post-LOI fall-through reduction — surprises that would otherwise emerge at diligence are surfaced before exclusivity
• →Re-engagement at 12–18 month horizon — operators who run the SA at 18-month horizon become pre-warmed mandate pipeline rather than cold prospecting
• →Cross-counterparty portability — the same artifact the buyer's IC reads is the artifact the lender's credit committee reads, the LP's review team reads, and the board director reviews

How sell-side bankers engage Capital Refinery

• →Refer operators to the $750 Self-Assessment as a pre-mandate screening tool — the operator pays directly; the banker gets earlier visibility into mandate quality
• →Refer operators to the $4,500 Readiness Gap Review at mandate signing — accelerates pre-CIM diligence prep
• →Refer operators to the full IRA when the seller is ready for the externally-distributable verification artifact — produced before CIM distribution; travels with the teaser
• →Apply for channel-partner status to qualify for referral economics: 10% of upgrade revenue on warm intros, 20% on qualified intros closing within 30 days
• →Engage the platform's buy-side surfaces directly when running buy-side mandates for institutional acquirers

What this is not

• →Not a CIM replacement — the IRA is structural readiness evidence; the CIM remains the marketing document the banker authors
• →Not a QoE replacement — buyer-side QoE still runs; the IRA accelerates the structural portion, not the deal-specific portion
• →Not co-brandable — every IRA artifact ships with the Capital Refinery engine output verbatim. The artifact's portability across counterparties depends on every IRA being engine-identical regardless of which banker introduced the operator. White-label requests are refused on this structural basis.
• →Not consulting — Capital Refinery sells productized software with verification artifacts. Modernization, governance documentation, recall-system overhaul, financial reconciliation, and operational remediation belong to channel partners. The platform produces the artifact; humans do the implementation work.
• →Not a banker referral fee on operator engagement — the platform charges the operator directly per the public price ladder. Channel-partner economics apply to upgrade revenue, not to entry-SKU enrollment.

Sources cited

• →IBBA (International Business Brokers Association) Market Pulse Report — quarterly middle-market M&A activity and fall-through patterns → https://www.ibba.org/resource-center/industry-research/
• →Sutton Place Strategies — sell-side M&A activity tracking
• →GF Data — middle-market deal multiples and M&A benchmarks
• →Axial — lower middle-market deal flow data and broker / sponsor activity → https://www.axial.net
• →Named sell-side advisory firms for sector citation context: Houlihan Lokey (multiple sector verticals), William Blair (Distribution, Industrial, Healthcare), Lincoln International (cross-sector), Harris Williams (cross-sector), Capstone Partners (lower-middle / middle-market). The IRA does not compete with these firms; bankers from all of them are eligible channel partners.