Stout

Stout

Stout was founded in Detroit in 1991 by Craige Stout, Jeffrey Risius, and Michael Ross, initially as a specialty valuation firm serving the middle market. The founders came out of the accounting world but deliberately chose a partnership structure independent of the major audit networks — a decision that still defines the firm. Today Stout operates from Chicago, having grown quietly through internal promotions and selective acquisitions rather than private-equity backing or public markets. The firm runs three primary lines. Investment banking handles M&A advisory, capital raising, and financial restructuring for mid-market companies, with particular depth in industrials, business services, and healthcare. Valuation advisory operates across fairness opinions, solvency opinions, and portfolio valuations for private equity funds and corporate clients — work that feeds into Stout's proprietary transaction databases. Dispute consulting provides expert testimony in litigation, arbitration, and regulatory matters, drawing on the firm's valuation data to support damage calculations and forensic analyses. The three units cross-feed deal flow and intellectual capital. Stout has expanded from its Detroit roots to multiple US cities and a London office, though exact headcount and office locations are not publicly aggregated in a single source. The partnership model — no outside investors, no audit affiliation — allows the firm to serve clients where the Big Four face conflicts. In March 2023, Stout acquired Andersch, a German restructuring and corporate finance advisory firm, extending its European reach (per Stout press release, March 2023). The firm's deals typically remain below the bulge-bracket threshold, focused on family-owned businesses, founder-led companies, and middle-market private-equity-backed assets. Stout's structural differentiator is its partnership-based independence combined with a multi-disciplinary model that rivals use one another's work product. A valuation expert witness can cite Stout's transaction comps without leaning on an external database; a banker can reference Stout's fairness opinion track record to de-risk a deal for a board. This integrated structure is uncommon outside the Big Four, but Stout faces none of the auditor-independence constraints that limit those firms' advisory capacity — a genuine advantage that has kept the firm competitive for three decades.