Coal Creek Advisors · About
Coal Creek Advisors is a Denver exit planning and M&A advisory firm founded by Josh Park — a corporate development executive who spent his career buying companies, and kept noticing the same preventable thing happening to the people selling them.
Why the firm exists
Buy enough companies and a pattern emerges. You meet an owner who has built something genuinely good over twenty or thirty years — real customers, loyal people, a reputation in their market. And within about a week of diligence you can see exactly why the business is going to trade for materially less than it should.
It is almost never a surprise, and it is almost never complicated. The owner is the business, so the buyer prices in the risk of them leaving. One customer is a third of revenue. The financials are built for the tax return, not for a lender. There's no second layer of management, so the acquirer has to supply one. None of that is a fatal flaw. All of it is fixable — in about three years.
Nobody had told them. Their CPA was doing the taxes, their attorney was doing the contracts, and neither job description includes "explain what a private equity buyer will subtract from your number and why." So they found out during diligence, at the worst possible moment, from the person on the other side of the table.
Josh Park
Josh has spent eighteen years running businesses and closing deals, with more than forty transactions behind him — acquisitions, product and portfolio deals, licensing and distribution agreements, a divestiture, and the integrations that followed.
Most recently he was Vice President of Mergers & Acquisitions at a private-equity-backed distribution platform, reporting to the CEO. He built the corporate development function there from nothing — the playbook, the sourcing engine, the pipeline infrastructure — and closed eleven acquisitions in three years, with one year's cohort alone adding seven locations and more than five percent of platform EBITDA.
Before that he was Director of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships for the most acquisitive division of a global medical technology company — five business units and more than $3 billion in combined revenue. He served as lead negotiator across the full build-buy-partner spectrum, including software acquisitions that required underwriting technology, intellectual property and a product roadmap alongside the financials. When the COVID capital markets froze, he kept deals moving by structuring licensing and distribution alternatives to outright acquisition.
Earlier, at a national manufacturer and distributor, he closed more than twenty transactions in two years and led the integration of the two largest acquisitions the company had made in a decade — valuing six thousand assets and negotiating seven distributor agreements in under a hundred days, with the combined operation beating its pre-deal model.
Before any of the M&A work, Josh ran businesses. He was a general manager over three manufacturing plants and three distribution centers, then a regional director with full P&L responsibility for thirteen business units and more than a hundred and fifty employees. He turned around an unprofitable market, rebuilt loss-making national accounts into profitable ones, and developed seven managers into leadership roles.
That grounding is the reason his diligence is honest and his plans are realistic. It's straightforward to write an integration plan that works on a slide. It's a different thing to have been the person who had to make one work on a plant floor on a Monday morning.
Josh started his working life in the United States Marine Corps, where he served as a Corporal from 2002 to 2010. He holds an Executive MBA from the University of Washington's Foster School of Business, a certificate from Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation, and is a Certified Exit Planning Advisor. He lives in Denver with his family.
Track record
Built the corp dev function from scratch, reporting to the CEO. Eleven acquisitions in three years; one year's deals added seven locations and 5%+ of platform EBITDA.
Lead negotiator for the company's most acquisitive division — five business units, $3B+ revenue. Acquisitions, licensing, distribution and co-development structures.
Operations first: full P&L for thirteen business units and 150+ people, three plants and three distribution centers, market turnarounds and seven managers developed into leadership. Then corporate development — 20+ transactions in two years including a divestiture, and the integration of the two largest acquisitions in a decade, under 100 days and ahead of model.
Credentials
Thirty minutes, no cost, no pitch — whichever side of the table you're on.