If Jerry Maguire did Corporate Finance
Most founders don’t need another adviser telling them what their EBITDA multiple might be.
Founders need someone who understands what they are actually trying to achieve, why it matters and how value is ultimately realised—not simply how it is priced.
Which is why, slightly unexpectedly, Jerry Maguire remains one of the better films about professional integrity, alignment and doing deals the right way.
Strip away the sports agents, American football and goldfish, and there are some surprisingly good lessons for corporate finance.
1. “Help me help you”
Good corporate finance doesn’t start with a spreadsheet.
It starts with understanding what the founder actually wants.
“Help me help you” means getting under the skin of the business and agreeing what a successful outcome really looks like. Is it maximum value? The right strategic partner? Partial liquidity? Retaining some ownership? Protecting the team, culture or legacy?
Because “get me the highest valuation” sounds straightforward until you discover that the highest bidder wants 100% ownership, a three-year earn-out and significant changes to the business.
Value is personal as well as financial.
Until the objective is clear, discussing valuation in isolation is premature. Some of the biggest mistakes in transactions come not from weak numbers, but from everyone reaching the end of the process and discovering they were optimising for different things.
Help us understand what you actually want. Then we can help you get there.
2. “Show me the money”
We couldn’t really write this article without this one.
Yes, the numbers matter. Quite a lot, as it happens.
But “show me the money” doesn’t mean finding the highest multiple in a comparable-transactions table and multiplying it by next year’s EBITDA.
It means building a defensible value story grounded in the financials and clearly demonstrating the underlying strengths of the business.
Why do margins look the way they do? What genuinely drives growth? How much revenue is recurring? Where has scalability actually been demonstrated? What does customer concentration tell us? And, crucially, why should this business be worth more to a particular buyer than simply its standalone financial value?
This isn’t about dressing up forecasts or engineering a heroic adjusted EBITDA number.
It is about connecting the financials to the strategic narrative—and making sure both survive scrutiny.
Buyers don’t buy spreadsheets. They buy businesses. The spreadsheet just needs to prove the story is true.
3. “It’s not about the money… it’s about the love”
Stay with us.
This is probably the line that sounds least like corporate finance—and may actually be the most relevant.
Because transactions involve people.
Founders who may have spent 10, 20 or 30 years building something. Management teams thinking about what happens next. Buyers trying to work out whether they can trust the people sitting opposite them. And advisers who are supposed to keep all of this moving towards an outcome everyone can live with.
Of course the money matters. But the highest headline price is not always the best deal, particularly once structure, earn-outs, rollover equity, future roles, culture and certainty of completion enter the equation.
Processes tend to go wrong when trust disappears, advisers prioritise a transaction over the right transaction, buyers feel they have been misled, or founders feel pushed towards an outcome they never really wanted.
The best results come from disciplined processes, competitive tension and robust negotiation—but also from understanding the people involved and what matters to them.
Maximise the value. Run the right process. But don’t lose sight of why the founder built the business in the first place.
Corporate finance, Jerry Maguire style
So perhaps Jerry had it about right.
Help me help you: understand the objective before designing the transaction.
Show me the money: build a value story the numbers can actually support.
It’s not about the money… it’s about the love: maximise value without forgetting the people behind the deal.
Admittedly, we tend to leave the goldfish at home.
But otherwise, it’s not a bad corporate finance playbook.