What is 2nd St Strategy?

2nd St Strategy is a boutique commercial due diligence and growth strategy firm focused exclusively on middle-market private equity. Engagements are principal-led, grounded in primary research, and accelerated by proprietary AI analytics.

What services does 2nd St Strategy offer?

Commercial due diligence (buy-side and sell-side), growth strategy for portfolio companies, voice-of-market research with B2B and B2C customers and experts, and AI analytics tools custom-built for PE diligence and portfolio strategy.

Who does 2nd St Strategy work with?

Middle-market private equity sponsors, independent sponsors, family offices, and PE-backed portfolio company management teams. Sectors include industrial and B2B services, business services, consumer services, healthcare services, software, and building products.

How is 2nd St Strategy different from other CDD firms?

Every engagement is run by James Agres directly with no hand-offs to analysts the client has never met. The firm pairs traditional primary-research-first commercial due diligence with proprietary AI tools, including PinpointIQ for geographic market intelligence on location-based roll-ups.

PinpointIQ is a geographic market intelligence platform built by 2nd St Strategy for PE firms backing location-based roll-ups. It covers 30+ verticals and 900+ U.S. markets and provides MSA-level TAM, competitive density, demographic drivers, and individual business data down to the census-tract level.

What is voice of market research?

Voice of market (VOM) research is structured primary research with the people who actually buy, use, sell, or compete with a product. In CDD it typically means current customer interviews, lost or former customer interviews, channel partner interviews, competitor interviews where possible, and topical expert calls. VOM is the qualitative evidence that turns a market description into a verdict on a thesis.

How many interviews are enough?

Depends on the population. For B2B categories with concentrated buyers, 20-30 structured calls across customers, channel, and experts is usually enough to triangulate the patterns. For consumer categories with millions of buyers, we pair a smaller qualitative call set with a quantitative survey of several hundred or several thousand respondents. The right number is the number that lets you draw a defensible conclusion, not a fixed quota.

What is the difference between expert calls and customer calls?

Customer calls answer 'why did you buy this' and 'what would make you switch.' Expert calls answer 'how does this category actually work.' Both matter. The mistake we see most often in CDD is overweighting expert calls because they are easier to schedule, then under-interviewing the customers who actually fund the business.

How does 2nd St handle interview confidentiality?

Every interview is non-attributed in the deliverable. Quotes are anonymized to a description ("VP of operations at a $50M HVAC operator in the Southeast") rather than a name and company. Sponsors get the verdict and the evidence; targets and competitors do not get a list of who talked.

Do you run quant surveys too?

Yes. Where the population supports it, 2nd St executes B2B and B2C surveys to size the patterns the qualitative work surfaces. We have run 80+ surveys across engagements. The combination of qualitative depth plus quantitative confirmation is more defensible than either alone.

2nd St Strategy. Commercial Due Diligence & Growth Strategy for Middle-Market PE.

Why the customer interview is the most important artifact

Every other data source in a commercial due diligence process can be read by both sides. Industry reports, government data, web scraping, company financials. The advantage a sponsor gets from CDD does not come from those sources. It comes from the conversations the seller cannot replicate.

The honest answer to “why did you choose this vendor over the alternatives,” from a customer who has no incentive to make the seller look good, is the most valuable data point in the process. The job of voice-of-market (VOM) research is to gather enough of those answers, structured carefully enough, that a pattern emerges.

What VOM research includes

At 2nd St Strategy, a full VOM program includes some mix of:

Current customers. Why they bought, what they considered, what would make them switch, what they pay, how satisfied they are.
Lost and former customers. Often the most informative calls in the whole program. Why they did not choose the target, or why they left.
Channel partners. Distributors, resellers, integrators, brokers. Whoever sits between the target and the end customer.
Competitor employees. Where possible, current or former employees at named competitors. Sourcing has to be careful; the conversations are gold.
Topical experts. Former executives at adjacent companies, retired industry leaders, regulatory experts, technical experts.
Quantitative surveys. Where the population supports it, B2B or B2C surveys to size the patterns from the interviews.

The four mistakes we see most often

1. Overweighting expert calls because they are easier to schedule

Expert networks make it easy to book 15 retired industry executives in a week. Customers are harder to reach. The temptation is to backfill the call count with experts and underweight customers. The result is a report that describes how the category works (which the sponsor probably already knew) without answering why customers actually buy this particular product.

2. Asking leading questions to confirm the thesis

“You like the product, right?” is the worst possible CDD question, and a surprising number of interview guides ask the equivalent. We open every call with neutral, open-ended questions and only get to thesis-specific probes after the customer has framed the category in their own words.

3. Confusing satisfaction with stickiness

A 9 out of 10 NPS does not mean a customer will not switch. A 6 does not mean they will. The right question is “what would make you switch, and how hard would it be.” That tells you about the moat. Satisfaction tells you about the relationship today.

4. No formal pattern coding

Calls without structured coding turn into anecdotes. The deck ends up with three customer quotes that support the thesis and three that contradict it, and the reader cannot tell which way the weight of evidence points. We code every call on a structured grid so the synthesis is reproducible and the patterns are visible.

How AI changes (and does not change) the work

AI is genuinely useful for three things in VOM research.

Transcription. Faster, cleaner, with speaker labels. We use a hardened pipeline for this.
Theme extraction. First-pass coding of dozens of transcripts against a structured framework. A human still reviews, but the time-to-first-draft is meaningfully shorter.
Pattern matching across engagements. The accumulated transcript corpus across 200+ engagements is itself a competitive asset. We can answer “has any customer in any deal we have done before said anything like this” in a way a one-off CDD shop cannot.

AI does not source the calls. AI does not run the call. AI does not decide whether a customer is hedging. The actual conversation is still the work, and the conversation still requires a senior person who knows what to listen for.

What 2nd St delivers

On a typical engagement, the VOM artifact is a structured chapter in the CDD deck with a verdict on each sub-thesis, the coded evidence behind each verdict, and selected anonymized quotes. The full call memo set lives behind it for the sponsor to read if they want.

Across 200+ engagements we have run 3,000+ expert and customer interviews and executed 80+ B2B and B2C surveys. Each one tightens the pattern recognition for the next.

Get in touch if you have an active process where the question is “what would the customer actually say.”

Voice of market research, done right.