Strategic finance and negotiation that show up in your EBITDA.
GroundTruthPartners is a two-person advisory practice for CFOs and CEOs of mid-market industrial, energy, and B2B-tech companies. We work across Europe, the Americas, and APAC.
We start with a two-day audit of your top contracts. Most audits find 3–5% of EBITDA that can be recovered in one negotiation cycle.
Our Services
Mid-market contracts are the biggest under-managed asset on your balance sheet.
Most CFOs and CEOs we speak to have several significant contracts: suppliers, customers, distributors, service providers - that together carry 60–80% of the revenue and the cost base.
Almost none of these companies have a systematic view of which of those contracts are underpriced, which have drifted, and which counterparties are quietly extracting value at every renewal.
The reason is not negligence. It is that the work sits between finance (who owns the numbers) and commercial (who owns the relationships), and it never becomes anyone's Monday morning priority.
We do the work that neither department has time to do, and we perform the initial audit in ten working days.
Stage 1: CONTRACT VALUE AUDIT
Delivered in ten working days.
We rank your top ten contracts by the EBITDA impact of a targeted renegotiation, using four levers: price, payment terms, ordering pattern, and volume commitments. You receive a two-page memo you can put in front of your board, and a live 45-minute presentation of the findings. Nothing is only emailed.
What you get:
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A ranked table of your top ten contracts with the estimated annual EBITDA impact of each intervention
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Named counterparty risks (concentration, drift, over-favorable terms, expiring price protections)
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A written recommendation of which three to five contracts to open first, and in which order
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A one-page scope and fee for Stage 2 if you want to proceed
Our fixed fee is deliberately below the threshold at which most groups require multiple signatures to commission a piece of advisory work.
Stage 2: CONTRACT RENEGOTIATION
If Stage 1 identifies contracts worth opening, we run the renegotiations as a shadow-negotiation mandate: we prepare, we rehearse, we sit in the room with your commercial and procurement leads, but they hold the pen.
Your relationship stays yours.
We charge an agreed percentage of the annualized savings. You know what our fee is on the day the contract is signed.
Stage 3: CONTRACT PORTFOLIO RETAINER
Once you have been through Stage 1 and one round of Stage 2, contracts drift. The retainer keeps them from drifting back. Quarterly portfolio review against the Stage 1 baseline.
Monthly 60-minute call with your CFO and heads of sales and procurement. Same-day counterparty pressure hotline: one hour of advice on any counterparty move: price change, volume push, terms request, the same day it happens.
Fixed fee per month for six or twelve months. Renewable.
Meet the Team
Jan Mastny
Industrial commercial and negotiation expert
Twenty-plus years in industrial and renewables commercial leadership across LEONI, Studer Cables, Onamba, and Ernst Schweizer. Specialist in APAC and European industrial sales. Now leading an independent negotiation and commercial-transformation practice.
Jan owns the commercial and counterparty side of every mandate: the elasticity read, the counterparty psychology, the negotiation preparation, the rehearsal, and the shadow-negotiation itself. He presents to commercial audiences.
Jana Zimova
Strategic finance and boardroom expert
Thirty years and forty-seven-plus mandates in finance leadership across Europe and the Americas. Most recently Head of Investment and Project Portfolio Management for Inter IKEA's global supply chain (a 30-billion-euro turnover, 50-plus countries, 20,000 people, roughly 650 million euros of active portfolio).
Member of the Boardroom, Zurich. Creator of the CFO as Negotiator program. Studied Executive MBA, Quantic School of Business & Technology. Founder of Elev8 Strategic Finance GmbH.
Jana owns the numbers side of every mandate: the baseline, the financial screen, the measurement, the memo, and the boardroom presentation. She presents to boards and investment committees.
How We Work & What We Believe
How we work together:
We invented the phrase "one gate, two signatures" and we mean it: nothing reaches a client, a board, or an investment committee without both of us having read it. There are no juniors on our engagements, because there are no juniors. We do not sub-out delivery to associates. The two people you meet on the first call are the two people who deliver the mandate.
What we believe & Five principles we work to
1. The value is already inside the client. Our job is to find it and hand it back. We are not a management consulting firm that arrives with an answer. We arrive with a method. The answer is in your contracts, your P&L, and your commercial relationships. We find it faster and more precisely than you can find it yourselves, because we do this for a living and you do not, and then we leave.
2. Findings are not edited for comfort. We say what we saw. If we thought a contract was underpriced by 6% and the CFO wants the memo to say 3%, we walk. A finding that is edited to protect a relationship is not worth writing.
3. We give away days, never the rate. If a mandate needs more work than we scoped, we do more work. We do not renegotiate the fee. The fee is what buys the discipline; the days are what buy the outcome. We have separated those two on purpose.
4. Capability transfer, not dependency. We prepare your people to negotiate. We do not replace them. If we sat at the table for them, we would build a business selling the same mandate every year to clients who never got stronger. We would rather sell you a smaller Stage 3 retainer than a bigger Stage 2 that hollows out your commercial team.
5. Reputation is asymmetric. One bad mandate costs more than three good ones earn. Which is why either of us can decline a mandate without justifying it to the other, and why we cap our concurrent engagements. We would rather turn work away than take a mandate we cannot land at the standard we set.
Who This Is For? Typically We Work With:
Industrial, energy, and technology companies, import/export-oriented.
We work best where there is a named decision-maker who can commission an audit without a six-week procurement process.
Serial acquirers. If you are running three to fifteen portfolio companies each with their own contract book, Stage 3 becomes a lightweight oversight layer across the group.