Coal Creek Advisors · Buy-Side
A corporate development function you can switch on — strategy, proprietary sourcing, diligence, negotiation and integration — run by someone who has built one from scratch and closed forty-plus deals using it.
The problem
The mandate is clear enough: add locations, add capability, consolidate a fragmented market. Then the work meets reality. Your CFO is closing the year. Your operators are running the business. Sourcing gets done in the gaps between other priorities, and the pipeline is whatever bankers happen to send you — which means you're paying auction prices for assets your competitors also saw.
The alternative is hiring a corp dev leader: a $250K-plus commitment, a six-month search, and a ramp before anything closes. That's the right answer at a certain deal volume. Below it, you end up with an expensive person waiting for work, or no capability at all.
The third option sits between those two: an outsourced corporate development function, scaled to the deal volume you actually have. Not a banker on a success fee who disappears between mandates — an operator working inside your business, building the pipeline, running the model, sitting across from the seller, and staying through integration.
Not usually price. They break on a pipeline built entirely from banker books, a thesis nobody stress-tested, diligence that missed the thing that mattered, and an integration plan written after close.
Every one of those is a capacity problem before it's a judgment problem.
What you get
Some clients need the entire function stood up. Others have a capable team and one specific gap — usually sourcing, or the fifty hours a week a live deal demands.
An acquisition thesis you can defend to a board, and a pipeline that isn't just inbound.
From first conversation to signature, with the modeling and negotiation that decide the outcome.
The part that determines whether the thesis was real. Planned before close, not after.
If the goal is to bring it in-house eventually, we build it so you can.
Track record
closed transactions — acquisitions, carve-outs, licensing, distribution, a divestiture.
acquisitions closed in three years at a PE-backed distribution platform, on a function built from scratch.
in division revenue at a global medical technology company, where the deal slate spanned five business units.
to integrate the two largest acquisitions in a decade at a national manufacturer — ahead of the pre-deal model.
The relevant detail isn't the count. It's that the same person set the strategy, made the calls, sat across from the sellers, and then owned what happened after close — including the deals that didn't work and the reasons why. Most advisors have done one slice of that. The full background is here.
How we work
What you're trying to buy, why, and what capability already exists internally. Usually a short conversation is enough to tell whether this is a sourcing problem, an execution problem, or a strategy problem wearing a disguise.
Thesis, target criteria, market map, and the outreach engine. First proprietary conversations typically start inside the first sixty days.
Monthly retainer, weekly cadence, a pipeline you can see. Live deals get the hours they need without your operators being pulled off the business.
If the goal is an in-house team, we build toward that deliberately — documented process, working infrastructure, and help hiring the person who inherits it.
Engagements are retainer-based with success fees on closed transactions. Structure is set up front and in writing, and the retainer scales to the mandate rather than to the size of any one deal.
Is this you?
Buy-side work runs nationally and considerably larger than the sell-side practice.
Most first conversations sort themselves out quickly. If the honest answer is that you need a full-time hire rather than a fractional one, I'll say so — and I'm happy to help you write the job description.
No pitch. No obligation.
Book a callThirty minutes on your thesis, your pipeline, and where the capacity is actually breaking.