Hire the pieces you need. Not the whole process.
Fee-for-service M&A advisory for owner-operated businesses, $3–100M. Fixed fees. No exclusives. No success fees.
- Free 30-minute call
- Fee agreed in writing
- Stop after any module
Built for the owner, not the advisor.
| Everyone else | SALTAIRE |
|---|---|
| 12-month exclusiveYou sign away a year before you know whether it's working. | Buy one moduleOne discrete piece of work, with no obligation to buy the next. |
| Success fee at closeA percentage of your life's work, owed when the deal closes. | Fixed fee, agreed up frontIn writing, before any work starts. Half up front. |
| All or nothingEverything comes bundled, whether you need it or not. | Start anywhere, stop anytimeJust the valuation, just the offer review, or the whole process. |
| Advisor gets paid if it closesSo the advisor needs a sale to happen. | Advisor gets paid for the workSo the advice doesn't depend on whether you sell. |
The standard M&A engagement is built for the advisor, not the owner. Everything comes bundled, whether you need it or not — so the owner who just wants a second read on a letter of intent ends up signing a year-long exclusive to get one.
We don't work that way. Every piece of a sell-side process — the valuation, the confidential information memorandum, the buyer outreach, the offer review, the diligence — is something you can buy on its own. If you need all of it, buy all of it, still at a fixed fee. Most owners don't.
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What's it worth?
A number, and the reasoning behind it.
Range of value opinion $1,000 What it's worth, and why. Delivered in a week. Most owners start here. -
Not ready yet
A plan to build value first, and help carrying it out.
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Going to market
Your story told for buyers, and buyers found.
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Offer to close
A second read on the letter of intent, and a team that works for you.
Scoped — priced per engagement after the intro call. Every fee is fixed and agreed in writing before work starts.
See the sell-side menuA memorandum that's still true six months in.
A normal confidential information memorandum is a PDF that starts going stale the day it ships. Six months into a process, a buyer is reading trailing twelve months that ended before the engagement started. Ours is masked, maintained and access-controlled.
Blind profilePUBLIC
No company name, no identifying customers or locations. Share it freely — it's the teaser.
Full documentGATED
Released one party at a time, behind a non-disclosure agreement, after they've been qualified.
MaintainedCURRENT
Refreshed monthly or quarterly while you're in market, so what a buyer reads is current.
Commercial HVAC service and maintenance, Northeast US
See who actually read it
Access logs show which buyers opened it and how far they got. Better signal than a follow-up email.
A record of what they saw
Versioning shows exactly what each buyer saw and when — useful if someone tries to retrade on it later.
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Finding a deal
Owners who aren't on the market, and triage of what's in front of you.
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Checking it
Diligence on the business you've found.
Diligence support Scoped Find what the confidential information memorandum left out. -
Getting it closed
The right advisers, and someone driving from the letter of intent to close.
Origination is a fixed-term search, not a retainer. A defined target universe and a defined outreach volume over 90 days. No open-ended monthly fee, no fee at close — so the incentives stay neutral.
Every fee is fixed and agreed in writing before work starts.
See the buy-side menuThree steps. The third one is optional.
- 1
Call.
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch. We figure out what you actually need.
- 2
Pick a module.
Fixed fee, agreed in writing, half up front, before any work starts.
- 3
Get the work.
Add another module, or don't. Nothing you buy commits you to more.
Read up before you call.
Answers to the questions owners ask first
Short, sourced answers on value, letters of intent, advisor fees and brokers. Every figure links to the page it came from.
- What is my business worth?Fair market value as the IRS defines it, the three valuation approaches, the SBA's valuation rule for financed purchases, and how an asset sale price is allocated.
- How to read a letter of intent before you sign itWhat to check in a letter of intent: the real price, asset sale or stock sale, SBA rules on seller notes and equity, and what the letter leaves open.
- What M&A advisors chargeHow M&A advisors are paid, with survey figures for work fees, success fees and the Lehman formula, why pay at closing matters to regulators, and what a fixed fee costs here.
- Business broker vs M&A advisorThe federal M&A broker exemption and its size limits, the SEC no-action letter it replaced, what M&A brokers do, and why it matters how an intermediary is paid.
Business valuation guides by city
One guide per metro area: who the buyers are, what the local economy runs on, and what the state adds to a sale. Pick a dot or a state.
A fixed point. You steer.
Nine years in the lower middle market and hundreds of deals. Mike has seen dozens of deals die, and he knows how and why.
We built Saltaire around fixed-fee modules because we watched owners get bundled into engagements they didn't need — a year-long exclusive and a percentage of the sale, just to get a second opinion. You should be able to buy the piece you need and keep the wheel.
Not sure what you need?
That's what the call is for.
Free. No pitch. No obligation to buy anything.
Thirty minutes
By video or phone, at a time that works for you.
We work out what you need
Which module fits, if any. Sometimes the answer is none yet.
You leave with a number
If a module fits, you'll know its fixed fee before you decide anything.
After the call
- If a module fitsWe'll say which one and what it costs. The fee is fixed and agreed in writing, half up front.
- If nothing fitsWe'll say that too.
See every module and its price before we talk: The sell-side menu → The buy-side menu →