Exit planning & M&A advisory · Denver, Colorado
Eighteen years of operating and deal-making experience, with forty-plus closed transactions behind them. If you're selling, that's someone who knows how the offer gets built. If you're buying, it's the person who used to build it.
Two practices
For owners two to five years out, and for owners with an offer already in hand. Find out what the business is worth, fix what's holding that number down, then run the process properly when it's time.
An outsourced corporate development team for platforms, sponsors and operators who need real deal capability now — strategy, proprietary sourcing, diligence, negotiation, integration.
The idea behind the firm
Most owners hear "exit planning" and picture the last ninety days — a broker, a data room, a closing dinner. That version is a transaction, and by the time it starts your value is already fixed.
Real exit planning is a business strategy. Everything that makes a company transferable — management that runs it without you, systems that survive turnover, customers contracted to the business rather than loyal to you personally — also makes it more profitable and less dependent on your presence today.
Which means the work pays whether you sell in three years, hand it to your daughter in ten, or never sell at all. The plan is the same. Only the ending changes.
Roughly 80% of a typical owner's net worth sits inside the business. About 70% of owners need to harvest that value to fund the life they want afterward.
So the business isn't just the business. It's the retirement account, the estate plan and the next chapter, all in one illiquid, undiversified position — and four owners in ten have never had it formally valued.
Nobody would hold a stock portfolio that way.
Why now
of owners want to exit within ten years. Half want out within five.
have no written transition plan — though 95% say having one matters.
have never assembled a formal transition advisory team.
of all exits are forced by an event the owner didn't choose.
Source: Exit Planning Institute, 2023 National State of Owner Readiness Report (n = 1,162 US business owners).
Everything that determines the number happens in the years before anyone makes an offer.
About
Forty-plus closed transactions — building the M&A function at a private-equity-backed distribution platform, leading negotiations for the most acquisitive division of a global medical technology company, and running acquisitions and integrations for a national manufacturer. Before any of that, a Marine and a plant manager.
That's an unusual background for someone advising owners, and it's the entire point. I know what a buyer's model looks like, which risks get priced in and which get waved through, and what actually moves a multiple versus what an owner merely hopes will.
Get in touch
Tell me a little about the business and what you're weighing. I'll come back within one business day.