In a corporate finance mandate, you are not hiring a firm. You are hiring the people who will sit across the table from your buyer, model your business at midnight, and stay on the phone through every complication until the deal is done. At Alchemy, those people are below.
Michael founded Alchemy in 1988 and has led it continuously since. What began as a specialist accounting practice evolved into a corporate finance and private equity group through three and a half decades of deal-making, relationship-building and direct involvement in some of South Africa's most interesting mid-market transactions.
His experience spans the full corporate finance spectrum: originating and structuring transactions, raising capital, advising business owners through disposals and acquisitions, chairing investee companies, and guiding management teams through the complex commercial decisions that define whether a business grows or stagnates. He has sat on both sides of the negotiating table more times than most advisors will in a career.
Michael was a founding shareholder in Waterlinx, a national water-products distribution platform that he helped develop and ultimately exit to global aquatics group Fluidra - a transaction that demonstrated exactly the kind of long-horizon, hands-on involvement that has characterised his approach throughout.
"The most important transactions in a business owner's life deserve more than a broker and a listing. They deserve someone who has done it before, who stays until it is done, and who has something at stake too."
Matthew brings together corporate finance, operational and systems experience, with a practical understanding of how businesses are valued, negotiated, acquired and improved.
He has worked across private equity, acquisitions, disposals, valuations, due diligence and financial modelling, with a particular strength in translating financial analysis into commercially workable transaction structures. His approach combines detailed modelling with a clear view of the operational realities behind the numbers: how a business runs, where value is created, and where the real risks sit.
Matthew has supported acquisition-related work for a listed multinational corporate, including opportunity evaluation, offer design, due diligence review and transaction support. This experience reflects the role he often plays in transactions: helping shape the commercial logic of a deal, testing the valuation, identifying risks, and supporting the negotiation process through to a practical outcome.
In addition to his corporate finance work, Matthew remains closely involved in operating businesses, including Hychem, Alchemy’s portfolio company in chemical manufacturing and distribution, where he serves as part-time CIO and drives strategic improvements across systems, operations and reporting. This gives him a grounded perspective on transactions: not only what a business is worth on paper, but what it takes to run, improve and grow it after the deal is done.
"Good deal-making is not just about the numbers. It is about understanding the business, the people, the risks and finding the structure that will actually work."
Aden is a lawyer whose work focuses on corporate transactions and commercial law. In the context of M&A advisory, legal capability at the principal level is rare and valuable: most advisory firms hand the legal work to external counsel and manage the relationship from a distance. Aden works directly on structuring, documentation and execution, which means the legal and commercial dimensions of a transaction are integrated from the start rather than negotiated after the fact.
His work covers the full range of corporate transaction requirements: shareholder agreements and restructuring, sale and purchase agreement negotiation and review, commercial due diligence from a legal perspective, transaction structuring across asset and share sale formats, regulatory considerations, and the day-to-day commercial agreements that determine how a deal actually closes rather than just how it looks on a term sheet.
Having a lawyer who understands the deal, not just the documents, at the table throughout a transaction changes the quality of the outcome - particularly in the critical period between heads of agreement and final signature, when legal process can either protect a deal or unravel it.
"The gap between a signed term sheet and a completed transaction is where most deals are won or lost. Legal rigour at that stage is not a formality - it is what protects the outcome both parties agreed to."
Alchemy takes a small number of mandates at any time. When we take yours, the principals above are the people who do the work: they attend the meetings, they build the models, they negotiate at the table, and they stay through to close. You will not be handed to an associate six weeks in.
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