Key takeaways
The IPO is downstream. Revenue construction comes years before the listing.
Layers smooth the cycle. Restructuring, valuations, and sponsor coverage stabilize earnings.
Stocks reveal the build. Trading multiples track how many layers exist underneath.
Private firms face the same math. Recurring revenue determines what any transaction prices at.
What most coverage of the Lincoln IPO missed
When Lincoln International filed to go public in late April, the coverage settled into a familiar frame: M&A is rebounding, the IPO window is open, an independent advisory firm is moving while it can. The framing is fair as far as it goes.
The filing is making a more specific argument — one that says part of Lincoln no longer behaves like investment banking at all. The story it tells about itself is the kind of strategic positioning that shapes investor interpretation long before any financial model gets opened.
The part of Lincoln that doesn't run on deals
Independent advisory has always traded at a discount to other financial services because the earnings swing too much. When deal activity is strong, fees compound. When it slows, revenue contracts almost in step. That cyclicality is the structural reason most banks carry a lower multiple than asset managers, exchanges, or insurers with comparable returns on equity.
Lincoln's filing splits the firm into two reportable segments. One is the traditional Investment Banking Advisory business that earns its fees on transactions. The other, Valuations and Opinions, is described by the firm in language that issuer documents rarely use: "growing, recurring, and non-cyclical."
The practice values illiquid assets — private companies, fund holdings, structured securities — for asset managers who need those marks every quarter for their own audited reporting. Lincoln's Private Market Index tracks roughly 7,000 portfolio companies for more than 225 sponsors. Each of those is a standing engagement that bills on a recurring cadence whether or not a single deal closes that quarter.
The economic profile of that revenue resembles a subscription more than a transaction fee. That overlooked distinction is what should change how the business is valued.
Why the 2025 financials understate what's there
Lincoln isn't going public on the strength of one strong year. The firm has spent two decades layering recurring and repeat-fee services around its core advisory business, and the financials in the filing reflect that compounding:
2025 revenue of $783.8 million, up from $578.7 million in 2024
Global M&A advisory fees more than doubled since 2000 to roughly $27.6 billion in 2025, per Lincoln's own analysis
Independent advisers nearly tripled their share of that fee pool to about 37% over the same period
The September 2025 acquisition of MarshBerry extended the platform further, plugging Lincoln into the insurance and wealth management consolidation cycle. MarshBerry brought M&A advisory alongside consulting, market intelligence, and benchmarking work — the consulting and intelligence pieces billed on retainer-style economics rather than per deal.
The Lincoln that filed in April is a different business than the one that existed five years ago. The IPO is the moment the market finally gets to look at it. The construction came first.
Why the listed boutiques don't trade alike
The publicly listed independent advisory firms have produced very different shareholder returns since their IPOs. Houlihan Lokey, public since August 2015, has materially outperformed the S&P 500. Moelis, listed in 2014, has delivered a 506% total return since IPO per its 2025 10-K, against the S&P 500's 353% over the same window. Perella Weinberg, public since 2021, hasn't kept that pace.
The divergence isn't random. It tracks how many revenue layers each firm has built underneath its M&A business, and what those layers do across the cycle.
Three segments, three economic profiles
Houlihan's Q3 fiscal 2026 results for the quarter ending December 31, 2025 show why this matters. The firm reports three segments:
Corporate Finance (M&A advisory): $474 million, up 12% year-over-year
Financial Restructuring: $156 million, up 19%
Financial and Valuation Advisory: $87 million, up 6%
Each line moves on its own logic. Restructuring grows when M&A slows — distressed companies need advisors regardless of dealmaking conditions. Valuation moves at its own pace because portfolio companies have to be marked every quarter no matter what. Corporate Finance carries the peaks and troughs of the deal cycle.
Blended together, aggregate earnings are smoother than any single line would suggest. That smoothing is what the market has been paying up for.
Sponsor coverage as connective tissue
When the same private equity firms come back year after year for advice, what looks like one-off transactional work starts behaving like a long-term account. Houlihan's Financial Sponsors Group manages roughly 2,000 active sponsor relationships and worked with 660 PE firms over the last five years. Moelis reports that sponsors make up about half its deal mix per its Q4 2025 materials, reflecting more than a decade of structural coverage of the private equity ecosystem.
Those numbers describe cross-sell infrastructure. A relationship that begins with an M&A mandate later becomes a continuation vehicle conversation, then capital advisory work, and eventually a restructuring engagement when a portfolio company struggles. Each engagement makes the next one easier to win.
That's the second source of the smoothing and the part of the model that's hardest for a smaller firm to replicate.
Evercore's fifteen-year chart, and what it reveals
The single clearest piece of evidence behind this whole thesis sits in Evercore's Q1 2026 investor presentation, released April 29. The firm shows its Investment Banking & Equities revenue growing from $0.3 billion in fiscal 2010 to $4.4 billion in the four quarters through Q1 2026 — a roughly fifteen-fold expansion.
That growth didn't come from doing more M&A. It came from steadily adding new lines of business around the original advisory core:
Liability management and restructuring
Capital advisory
Equity research, sales, and trading
Private capital advisory
The October 2025 acquisition of Robey Warshaw extended the EMEA advisory franchise. The Private Capital Advisory and Private Funds Group practices target continuation funds, LP secondaries, and fundraising — all areas where the same institutional clients come back fund after fund.
One caveat: Evercore's Q1 2026 revenue of $1.4 billion was a record, doubling year-over-year, but the firm's own filings note that quarterly results "may fluctuate significantly" because of deal-fee timing. Building more revenue layers reduces volatility, but it doesn't eliminate it. Anyone reading a single quarter as a trend is making a mistake the issuers themselves keep warning against.
Where Perella Weinberg fits in the picture
Perella Weinberg reported 2025 revenue of $751 million, down 14% from a record $878 million in 2024. The firm closed fewer M&A deals, and the financing work it did pick up wasn't enough to make up the difference.
But the same release noted something else: PWP bought a firm called Devon Park Advisors in 2025 to start building out its secondaries practice — exactly the kind of recurring-revenue layer the other public boutiques have been adding for years.
That changes the read. PWP isn't the firm that proves the platform model wrong. It's the firm that's behind on building one. The 14% revenue drop is what happens when most of your revenue still depends on deals closing.
Where each listed boutique trades reflects how far along that build is. Five things separate the firms that have done the work from the ones that haven't:
Valuing private assets on standing contracts that bill quarterly
Advising on secondaries and continuation vehicles, where the same sponsors come back fund after fund
Helping managers raise capital across multiple funds
Restructuring work, which picks up exactly when M&A slows down
Coverage teams that turn each new sponsor relationship into multiple engagements over time
The reason Houlihan, Moelis, and Evercore trade where they do — and PWP trades where it does — comes down to how many of those layers each firm has actually built, and how much of its total revenue runs through them. Public-market multiples make the difference visible. In private transactions, the same dynamic determines how investors interpret what a firm is actually worth.
Bottom line
The most useful question this filing raises is what it means for the firms that haven't filed.
Most of the independent advisory market is still private — William Blair, Harris Williams, Raymond James's investment banking arm, Stifel, the Houlihan-adjacent boutiques across Europe and Asia. Some have built three or four of the recurring-revenue layers above. Others have built one, or none. Whether any of them ever lists is beside the point. The same revenue mechanics that drive public-market multiples also drive what minority stakes, strategic sales, and management-led recapitalizations price at.
Two diagnostic questions follow for any private advisory firm thinking about strategic optionality:
How would the firm describe its revenue construction if a sophisticated investor asked tomorrow?
And how closely would that description match what the segment data would actually show?
Firms whose narrative keeps pace with their economics will transact at the multiples the public peers earn. Firms whose investor materials describe a business that no longer exists will leave value on the table regardless of where the deal cycle goes.
That second piece is where most of the work sits. Collateral Partners helps independent advisory firms sharpen how their model gets read by the investors who matter — the strategic positioning and investor relations infrastructure that turns segment data into a credible institutional narrative.
