Tom Cobery

Tom Cobery is a Partner at Ideadvisors, the business advisory arm of Idealliance, a global trade association and standards/certification body for the print, packaging, and graphic-communications industries. In that role he leads M&A and strategic-transaction work — buyer/seller outreach, valuation and deal-structure guidance, letter-of-intent preparation, and post-merger integration — for member companies in commercial printing, labels, and packaging.

Before Idealliance absorbed it, Cobery served as Vice President / Senior Consultant at Epicomm and, earlier, as a Vice President at the Association of Marketing Service Providers (AMSP). Epicomm was formed in 2014 from the merger of AMSP with the National Association for Printing Leadership (NAPL) and the National Association of Quick Printers (NAQP); Epicomm's staff and resources were subsequently combined with Idealliance around 2016–2017, which is how his advisory practice moved under the Idealliance/Ideadvisors banner.

Across these roles Cobery has focused on the business and financial side of graphic communications — advising owners and executives on the sale, acquisition, and operational strategy of printing and specialty-products businesses. Idealliance itself describes Ideadvisors as providing "a wide variety of business advisory services in critical areas of graphic communications management," including mergers and acquisitions, sales, operations, and finance.

• Focus is M&A advisory, not equity investing. Cobery represents company owners in buying, selling, or merging established print/packaging businesses — he is a deal advisor/intermediary rather than a check-writing angel.
• Sector: graphic communications — commercial printing, pressure-sensitive labels, narrow-web/flexographic converting, and packaging.
• Deal size signal: In a 2017 buy-side mandate he sought a pressure-sensitive label company with $3–20 million in revenue for a privately held Midwest client — a useful indicator of the size of businesses he works with.
• What makes a deal work (in his words): he favors "forward-thinking" companies "positioning [themselves] for future success and growth," and Ideadvisors structures transactions to deliver fair terms that support the acquired company's continued growth.