Corporate Divestiture Consultants     

The Corporate divestitures are strategic acts disguised as transactions. The decision to sell a business unit, spin off a division, or carve out a non-core asset is rarely just a deal — it is a portfolio decision, a capital allocation decision, and very often a signal to the market about where the parent intends to compete next. Boards approve divestitures to sharpen focus, fund growth, or unlock value the conglomerate discount has buried. None of that strategic intent gets realized unless the execution holds: the perimeter is drawn cleanly, the carve-out financials are defensible, the TSA does not become a multi-year drag, and the parent emerges with stranded costs eliminated rather than absorbed. The strategic case is made in the boardroom. The value is captured — or lost — in the separation.

Stonehill provides senior corporate divestiture consultants to public and private parents executing carve-outs, spin-offs, and business unit sales. Our practitioners have personally led divestitures across financial services, consumer, industrials, and tech-enabled services, working directly with corporate development, the CFO organization, and divisional leadership. We embed inside the separation management office on the seller side, with full accountability for the operational work that determines whether the divestiture delivers on its strategic thesis. We bring the rigor of a transaction-grade firm and the agility of a boutique — which is the combination most middle market parents actually need, and the one the bulge-bracket firms are not built to deliver. We are the firm that makes middle market mergers work.

• Divestiture Readiness and Perimeter Definition - The single most consequential decision in any divestiture is what gets sold. Perimeter definition determines the carve-out financials, the TSA scope, the stranded cost exposure, and the buyer universe — and it is almost always harder than it looks at the strategy stage. We work with corporate development, finance, and divisional leadership to define the perimeter cleanly: which legal entities, contracts, customers, employees, IP, systems, and assets transfer, which stay, and which require negotiation. The output is a defensible separation perimeter the deal team can take to market with confidence.

• Carve-Out Financials and Standalone Cost Modeling - Buyers, lenders, and quality-of-earnings providers will pressure-test the carve-out financials hard, and weakness in the model is where deal value erodes in negotiation. We build carve-out P&Ls that withstand diligence — direct cost identification, allocation methodology, standalone cost adjustments, one-time separation costs, and the bridge from segment reporting to a credible standalone view. The work supports the CIM, the management presentation, and the sell-side QoE, and it gives the deal team a fact base that holds up across rounds.

• Sell-Side Separation Planning and Day 1 Readiness - A divestiture only closes when the divested business can operate. We drive the function-by-function separation plan that delivers a Day 1-ready entity to the buyer — finance close capability, payroll, IT services, HR administration, procurement, customer-facing systems, and the contractual and regulatory work that has to happen in parallel. For corporate sellers, the goal is a clean handoff that preserves the value that was negotiated and protects the parent's reputation with the buyer, with employees, and with the market.

• TSA Design, Pricing, and Exit - The TSA is the seller's most under-managed source of post-close cost and risk. We design TSAs that recover cost properly, define exit timing realistically, and protect the parent from open-ended scope creep — and we run the TSA management office through the term of the agreement to ensure services are billed, governance is maintained, and exit happens on schedule. The companion work, which most sellers underinvest in, is the parallel program inside the parent to retire the headcount, contracts, and infrastructure the divested business is leaving behind.

• Stranded Cost Mitigation and Parent-Co Right-Sizing - Stranded costs are the quiet failure mode of corporate divestitures. The business sells, the proceeds book, and the parent discovers eighteen months later that overhead never came out — the shared services group is the same size, the real estate footprint did not shrink, the IT contracts did not renegotiate, and the margin expansion the strategy promised never materializes. We build and execute the stranded cost program in parallel with the separation: target identification, function-by-function right-sizing, contract renegotiation, real estate consolidation, and the governance to hold the work through the 12 to 24 months it actually takes. This is where the divestiture's strategic thesis is either delivered or quietly abandoned.

Why Stonehill

Corporate divestitures reward consultants who have actually led them. The work is functional, operational, cross-departmental, and politically textured in ways that boutique strategy firms and templated Big Four engagements both struggle with. Stonehill staffs every divestiture with embedded senior practitioners — not a leveraged team with a partner who appears at steering committees and disappears in between. We have led carve-out and divestiture work for corporate clients including Valley National Bank, PODS, FIS, The Melting Pot, Red Bull, and Starbucks Latin America, and we work the way corporate development teams and CFOs actually want to work: senior, embedded, and accountable for the outcome the board approved.

If you are evaluating a divestiture, preparing one for market, or working through a separation that is not delivering on the thesis, we should talk. Reach out for a working session — we will come prepared with a view on your situation, not a generic capabilities deck.