Method you can inspect. Results you can audit.
Every Meridian engagement runs on a small set of playbooks we have built, tested, and re-run across portfolio companies. Nothing below is theory. Each one exists because a sponsor needed it to work more than once.
Commercial Diagnostics Hub
A standing fact base for the commercial engine, built the same way every time: cost-to-serve, quote-to-cash, go-to-market coverage, pricing realization, product and customer mix, site-level variance — all on a common KPI dictionary so companies in a portfolio can be read side by side.
What it produces: a ranked map of commercial interventions with sizing, sequencing, and owner — the difference between "we should fix pricing" and "these four leaks, in this order, worth this much."
Pricing Calibration & Margin Leakage
Most portfolio companies do not have a pricing problem; they have a pricing realization problem. List prices are fine. The leaks are downstream: discount drift, uncosted change orders, stale quotes, freight and surcharge giveaways, mix erosion. This program finds the leaks, sizes them, and closes them — with the controls to keep them closed.
What it produces: a re-calibrated pricing architecture, a leakage dashboard the CFO trusts, and margin recovered without volume loss.
Capital Efficiency
Working capital is the cheapest funding a portfolio company has. This playbook systematically compresses the cash conversion cycle — receivables discipline, inventory rationalization, payment-terms architecture — and redirects the released cash into the transformation itself. In multiple portfolio companies, working-capital gains have self-funded the transformation.
What it produces: released cash, a lower-risk transformation budget, and a repeatable cash discipline that survives the exit process.
Value-Creation Review Cadence
Playbooks decay without cadence. Meridian runs a quarterly value-creation review across the portfolio: a common heat map of commercial health by company, stage-gated tracking of every live intervention, and a forum where what works in one company becomes standard in the rest.
Embedded mandates
Some situations need an operator in the seat, not a program alongside it. Meridian takes interim CCO and CRO mandates with direct P&L ownership — commercial engine rebuilds, pricing architecture resets, buy-and-build commercial integration. Same playbooks, executed from inside the business, accountable for the number.