M&A Diligence & Deal Execution · $1M+ EBITDA

Know the real numberbefore you sign.

Senior-led transaction diligence and management across the full deal lifecycle for the lower middle market. Led by a principal from the kickoff call, not reviewed by one at the end. Fast enough to keep your deal on schedule, scoped to the deal in front of you.

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The gap we fill

National firms won’t. Local firms can’t.

If you do programmatic acquisitions in the lower-middle market, you already know the diligence problem. Deals $1M to $50M+ of EBITDA fall into a structural gap: too small for the national transaction advisory firms, too complex for a local CPA.

The national firms either won’t engage below roughly $25M of EBITDA, or they staff it with first-year associates when they do. The local firm knows the numbers but lacks the private-equity process discipline a live deal timeline demands. Neither gives you a senior person who has done this hundreds of times, fast enough to keep your deal on schedule, priced so the fee makes sense against a $4M-EBITDA target.

Every engagement is led by a principal. Not reviewed by one at the end, but led by one from the kickoff call.

What we do

Senior-led support across the full deal lifecycle

Every engagement is scoped to deal complexity, not deal size, and priced on a defined scope before work begins. Pricing is available upon request.

Buy-side

Diligence that keeps your deal on schedule

Normalized Adjusted EBITDA: A pre-LOI quick-look to pressure-test the number before you commit. One to two weeks.
Full Buy-Side QoE: Post-LOI: adjusted EBITDA, working capital, closing estimates, net debt, and proof of cash. Three to six weeks.
Tax Diligence & Advisory: Identifies potential tax exposures across income, sales and use, payroll, and other applicable taxes, with recommendations to support negotiations and purchase agreement protections.
Add-On / Tuck-In QoE: Streamlined, templated diligence built for platform add-ons. Two to three weeks.
Platform Retainer: A master agreement for funds doing three or more add-ons a year. We reserve capacity for your pipeline.
Deal Management: Data-room operations, advisor and timeline management, and buyer and seller communication, backed by direct experience in deal strategy, pricing, earnout structure, and negotiations. Advisory support from operators with active platform-building experience.

Cyber, IT & AI diligence

The buyer question most sellers can’t answer

Buyers aren’t just asking about firewalls and backups anymore. They’re asking how a target uses AI, what data feeds it, and what that means for IP ownership, data privacy, and R&W exposure.

Cyber Diligence: Identity and access controls, endpoint protection, backup and recovery, incident history, and cyber-policy review, delivered as a risk-rated findings summary.
IT Diligence: Licensing exposure, technical debt, key-person and vendor dependencies, control gaps, and the integration lift a buyer should expect.
AI Diligence: Which AI tools and models are running in the business, what data flows into them, and what belongs in reps and disclosure.
Recommendations & Roadmap: Prioritized, costed remediation from each review: what to fix before closing, what to budget for Day 1 to 180, and what to reflect in the purchase price or escrow.

Disclosure

Schedules that hold up at the table

Disclosure-Statement Support: Building and stress-testing the disclosure schedules that most often trigger buyer re-trades, with support for cleaner R&W insurance terms.

Sell-side & exit readiness

For founder-led sellers and the businesses you back

Sell-Side QoE & Recast: Preemptive quality of earnings and a GAAP-aligned recast that documents add-backs and pre-empts buyer findings before you go to market.
Exit-Readiness Advisory: 18 to 36 month engagements that get a business’s numbers and story ready before it goes to market.

Built for add-on-heavy strategies

A platform doing three to six add-ons a year cannot afford a six-week QoE on a $500k tuck-in, and cannot afford to skip diligence either.

We built our add-on product for exactly this: templated, senior-led, two-to-three-week turnaround based on your deal room speed, priced so the diligence is proportional to the deal. A platform retainer means we hold capacity for your pipeline instead of making you wait in someone else’s queue.

Talk to us about a platform retainer

Who we serve

Built for the people who live in this market

PE Funds & Platforms

Private equity funds and family offices acquiring lower-middle-market businesses, and PE-backed platforms doing programmatic add-on M&A.

Founder-Led Sellers

Business owners preparing for sale, from early exit-readiness planning through closing and post-closing true-up.

Referral Partners

CPAs, M&A and commercial attorneys, commercial bankers, insurance brokers, and wealth advisors working alongside their clients.

Who you work with

Principals carry every engagement

From kick-off through closing you're working with the people whose names are on the door.

Olya Lumelleau, CPA

Co-Founder & Managing Director

Olya is a licensed CPA in Texas and a transaction advisory professional who has advised on more than 400 transactions over nearly a decade focused on the lower middle market. Her work spans the full deal lifecycle: quality of earnings, red flag analyses, recast financials, and net working capital before close, then purchase accounting, working capital true-ups, and earnout calculations after it.

Olya is at her best where the financials are disorganized, incomplete, or barely exist, turning fragmented accounting records, bank activity, and payroll data into clear, supportable financials and transaction schedules a buyer can rely on. Before co-founding Axiom, Olya built and led the transaction advisory practice at a Houston professional services firm, where she served as a shareholder. Her clients range from founders and searchers to family offices and private equity groups with more than $1 billion under management. She is a frequent speaker on QoE best practices and holds degrees in Accounting and Finance from Ivan Franko National University in Lviv, Ukraine.

Lisa Goode

Co-Founder & Managing Director

Lisa’s path to Axiom runs through three careers: a decade in IT, a decade in B2B sales leadership, and more than a decade in lower-middle-market M&A at a boutique intermediary serving both buy-side and sell-side clients. She has closed 25+ transactions totaling more than $600 million in enterprise value and roughly $100 million in aggregate EBITDA at purchase, including 10 add-on acquisitions worth more than $225 million for a private equity client’s multi-year buy-side program in industrial and commercial services.

Lisa has personally managed every stage of a transaction from both chairs: target identification, pricing, and LOI negotiation on the buy side; recast financials, buyer vetting, diligence management, and post-closing true-up on the sell side. Few advisors in this market have run a deal end to end from both sides of the table. Her IT background also makes her the client-facing lead of Axiom’s IT diligence practice.

How the principals work

The partnership behind Axiom

Olya and Lisa spent six-plus years on the same deals prior to founding Axiom. Axiom exists because their track record made the case for itself: two professionals who had stress-tested how they work together under deal pressure, and decided to build the firm around that fit rather than assembling a team and hoping it works.

This partnership shows up in how the firm runs. QoE, financial and tax deal advisory sit with Olya; deal execution and management sit with Lisa. Neither is a solo lane. Clients get one team’s judgment, start to finish.

Board advisors

The bench behind the principals

Behind the principals sits a senior advisory bench in business strategy, business development, and IT, cyber, and AI diligence. Depth most boutiques at this size cannot cover.

Curtis Czemeres

Advisor · Business Strategy

Curtis brings more than 25 years of building and scaling businesses, most recently as CEO of a private equity backed platform that grew from one to nine operating companies and from $14 million to more than $260 million in revenue in under five years. At Axiom he serves as the firm’s overall business consultant, bringing an operator’s playbook to sales, operational, technology, growth, and exit initiatives.

Thomas J. Sweet, PE

Advisor · IT, Cyber & AI

Tom is an award-winning technology executive and 2023 Tech Titans Emerging CIO/CTO with more than 20 years leading enterprise-scale digital transformation, with prior roles at GM Financial, Maptek, and Microsoft. Currently CIO of a growing industrial services platform, he specializes in building AI-empowered organizations and integrating acquisitions. At Axiom, Tom leads the firm’s IT, cybersecurity, and AI strategy and diligence execution.

Heath Chapman

Advisor · Business Development

Heath is an experienced entrepreneur, operator, and business advisor with a background spanning banking, finance, manufacturing, construction, and industrial services. Having built and operated businesses and completed a private equity exit in 2022, he brings a practical understanding of both the buyer’s perspective and what owners face when preparing for a sale. At Axiom, Heath advises the board and supports business development across the firm’s services.

The Axiom difference

Senior judgment, at the speed your deal moves

Principal-led, always

A senior partner runs your engagement from kickoff to close, never handed to a first-year associate.

Fees scale with complexity, not size

A $500k tuck-in gets a right-sized engagement, not a national-firm rate card.

Blue-collar, owner-operator fluency

We speak the language of roofing, HVAC and refrigeration, industrial and commercial services, and specialty distribution, which makes diligence faster and sellers more cooperative.

100% women-owned

Senior-led diligence and a reportable diverse-vendor spend credit from the same engagement.

Women-owned · WBENC member

Senior diligence and a reportable diversity credit, from the same engagement

Axiom Deal Partners is a 100% women-owned business and a member of the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC).

For your fund, that is not a talking point. It is a line item. If your LPs ask about supplier diversity, or your portfolio companies report diverse-vendor spend to institutional investors, the diligence and advisory work you route to us counts.

100% women-owned · WBENC member

Insights

Notes from the deal table

All insights

Quality of Earnings

What a quality-of-earnings analysis actually proves

A quality-of-earnings analysis is not an audit. It is the work of separating the number a business reports from the number a buyer can rely on. Here is what it tests, and why it matters most in the lower-middle market.

June 15, 2026 · 6 min read

Add-on M&A

Add-on diligence is broken at the national firms

A platform doing three to six add-ons a year cannot run a six-week QoE on every $3M tuck-in, and cannot afford to skip diligence either. The fix is a different product, not a different vendor.

June 8, 2026 · 5 min read

Disclosure

Disclosure schedules: where lower-middle-market deals quietly lose value

The disclosure schedules are the least glamorous exhibits in a purchase agreement and the most reliable place for a deal to slow down, lose value, or generate a post-closing dispute. Both sides can do better.

May 28, 2026 · 5 min read

All insights

Let’s talk

Let’s talk about your next deal

We would welcome the chance to walk your team through a recent engagement and discuss how a platform retainer would work against your pipeline. A 30-minute call is the best way to start. Pricing available upon request.

Email: inquiries@axiom-dp.com
Where we work: Houston · Dallas-Ft. Worth · Southern California · Kansas City