Peakview Partners: Experience Is Knowing Which Differences Matter

In middle-market M&A, no two transactions are exactly alike. Different owners bring different objectives. Different buyers see value differently. And different businesses present their own opportunities and complications. For Peakview Partners, navigating those differences starts with experience.

Peakview Partners is a boutique investment bank providing M&A advisory and growth capital financing services to privately held and private equity-backed middle-market companies. The firm primarily advises companies with $2 million to $15 million of EBITDA, with clients typically consisting of entrepreneurs and family-owned businesses across industries including healthcare, manufacturing and distribution, industrials, technology, and business and energy services.

A valued member of the Britehorn Securities broker-dealer platform since 2018, Peakview has completed transactions representing hundreds of millions of dollars in aggregate transaction value during its affiliation with the firm. That track record reflects years of advising business owners through complex transactions and successfully navigating the challenges inherent in middle-market dealmaking.

A Senior-Banker Model

Peakview has deliberately built its practice around senior-level execution. Rather than handing portions of an engagement down to junior bankers, Peakview's senior investment bankers handle every aspect of a transaction—from diligence and preparation of marketing materials to developing the target buyer list, conducting the marketing process, negotiating the transaction and ultimately getting it closed. The firm does not employ junior investment bankers. The 5 senior bankers on the Peakview team, all registered with Britehorn Securities, lead and execute all the M&A deals the firm works on.

For a business owner contemplating what may be the most consequential financial transaction of his or her career, that model provides something increasingly valuable: continuity. The bankers who understand the business, its owners and the objectives behind the transaction remain directly involved throughout the process.

The M&A Market Is Rewarding Quality

Peakview sees a meaningful divide in today's M&A market.

High-quality businesses continue to attract substantial buyer interest and attractive valuations. In particular, Peakview points to growing companies with strong gross and operating margins, limited customer concentration, low capital expenditure requirements and capable management teams as particularly well positioned. Those characteristics can also make businesses more resilient in the face of recessionary conditions.

The picture is considerably different for businesses that do not share those characteristics. There is currently a significant supply of what Peakview describes as "B" quality companies in the market. Many of those businesses may struggle to complete a transaction at all, while others may ultimately transact at comparatively low valuation multiples.

The lesson for owners is straightforward: simply being in the market does not create value. Buyers differentiate aggressively, and the underlying quality of the business matters.

Let the Market Speak

One mistake Peakview frequently sees among business owners is becoming rigidly attached to a predetermined sale price.

An owner naturally has a view of what a company is worth. But ultimately, value is established through a competitive process in which qualified buyers evaluate the business and determine what they are willing to pay. Peakview cautions owners against allowing an arbitrary price expectation to override the information produced by that process.

A well-run competitive process does more than solicit offers. It creates the environment in which the market can establish value, and ultimately delivers multiple options (financial and non-financial) for the owners of quality companies.

The Deal That Took Two Years

Experience in M&A also means learning to navigate circumstances that no textbook could anticipate. The most difficult transaction of one Peakview banker's career involved the sale of an aerospace components business owned by a husband and wife. During the process, he learned that one of their principal motivations for selling was decidedly unusual: both owners were self-described "doomers" who wanted to complete a sale before what they feared could be a broader societal collapse.

Yet the transaction ultimately took more than two years to complete.

The irony was hard to miss. Despite their concern about an impending collapse, the owners repeatedly wrestled with whether they actually wanted to sell the company. Getting the transaction closed required navigating not merely valuation, diligence and negotiations, but the very human uncertainty that can accompany an owner's decision to part with a business.

It is a useful reminder that M&A is never purely financial. Particularly with entrepreneur- and family-owned businesses, a successful advisor must understand the people sitting across the table as well as the numbers appearing in the financial statements.

Closing Thoughts

Peakview distills that experience into a deceptively simple observation:

"Every transaction is different. Experience is knowing which differences matter."

That may be one of the better descriptions of experienced dealmaking. Transactions inevitably produce complications, surprises and distractions. The value of an experienced advisor is not expecting every deal to follow the same path. It is recognizing which developments require attention, which require action—and which are simply part of getting a deal closed.

With hundreds of millions of dollars in completed transactions since joining Britehorn Securities in 2018, Peakview has demonstrated the value of that philosophy in practice. Its longstanding relationship with Britehorn reflects the kind of experienced, independent investment banking practice that our platform was built to support.

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Peakview Partners is an independent investment banking group whose principals are registered with Britehorn Securities.

Closing Thoughts is a recurring Britehorn Securities series featuring perspectives, experiences and insights from independent investment bankers and M&A advisors affiliated with the firm.