From close to exit — one operating model.

A structured review of a target company's marketing engine — conducted pre-close as a deal-team input, or in the first 60 days post-close as the Day-1 plan. It assesses spend efficiency, attribution integrity, brand equity, lead quality, vendor concentration, channel mix, geographic coverage, competitive positioning, and operational maturity — and produces an EBITDA-impact estimate splitting what's recoverable from what's structural. It's the operator's read of the marketing function, packaged so the deal team can use it as a specialist marketing workstream alongside commercial, operational, and financial DD if they want.

The LOI-to-Day-100 marketing playbook is a documented, sequenced operating plan for the marketing function — built around the deal thesis, scoped to the platform's specific add-on cadence, and ready to deploy the day the wire clears. It eliminates the typical 30-day discovery and 60-day rebuild that costs platforms a full quarter of value-creation runway. Sheppard builds it before close so the operating partner can act on it from Day 1.

Value creation is the install phase — building the operating system: dashboards, attribution methodology, vendor consolidation, AI workflows, and playbooks the portco can run. Execution is the run phase — operating that system day to day, either embedded as the marketing function or managing the agencies that do it. Most sponsors over-buy execution and under-invest in value creation, then wonder why the platform underperforms at exit.

Marketing's EBITDA contribution comes from four value-creation levers: (1) lower customer acquisition cost through channel-mix optimization and vendor consolidation, (2) higher booked-call rate from better lead quality, dispatch, and creative, (3) higher average ticket from membership conversion and price-led merchandising, and (4) reduced fixed overhead from consolidated agency stacks. A platform running all four typically captures 150–400 bps of EBITDA improvement inside 18 months.

We build the marketing data room from Day 1, not month 9 of the exit process. That means clean attribution methodology, vendor-by-vendor performance lineage, channel-mix narrative, brand-equity baselines, sponsor-facing dashboards, and a transferable systems pack the buyer's team can run on Day 1 of the next ownership cycle. The platforms that do this defend their multiple under buyer-side diligence; the ones that don't lose half a turn of EBITDA in negotiation.