Ron Smith is the Founding Partner of Cordis Group, the M&A intelligence firm he built to serve founder-owned and family-owned businesses preparing for ownership transition. Most private business owners prepare to sell before identifying the buyer landscape. That cost shows up at LOI in retraded terms, broken deals, and lost exit value. Cordis calls it the misalignment tax. The firm reverses the standard sequence, reading the acquirer's underwriting model first and mapping the founder's preparation backward from there. The approach is published as buyer-lens readiness. Ron personally has a hand in every sell-side mandate. Cordis is selective in its engagements, working with founder-owners in the $5M to $250M enterprise value band. As the architect of the firm's buyer intelligence infrastructure, Ron built SENTRY, a probabilistic simulation engine that models exit outcomes across five acquirer lanes: private equity add-ons, private equity platforms, strategic acquirers, family offices, and search funds or independent sponsors. Ron grew up in a multi-generation family HVAC business, spent a decade on Wall Street in capital formation, and led an advisory team at AllianceBernstein before founding Cordis. He is Editor-in-Chief of Cordis Institute, the independent research arm publishing peer-reviewed working papers on lower middle market M&A, and Publisher of Cordis Foundry, the publication-first business for operator-founders. Headquartered in the Grey Bar Building, New York City.