Advisory for owners, founders, and visionaries

Most owners build something remarkable and still never get the outcome they earned.

Closing that gap takes an advisor who is there for the whole journey, strengthening operations, aligning the leadership team, and building a company that is ready before it has to be. I’m an entrepreneurial investment banker with twenty years across banking, exit planning, and operational transformation. I help owners build businesses valuable enough to be ready for anything: an acquisition, a capital raise, a divestiture, or a sale.

How can we help? → See what’s involved
20+Years advising owners
100+Transactions completed
CEPACertified Exit Planning Advisor
EOSProfessional Implementer
Series 79Licensed investment banker

The value gap

Most lower middle market businesses leave 1.5 to 2.0 turns of EBITDA multiple on the table at exit.

That gap is addressable, but only if the work starts 18 to 24 months ahead of any transaction. Most owners don’t know their timing that far in advance, which is the argument for being ready regardless. By the time a buyer is at the table, the value of the business is already whatever it is.

The work that closes the gap isn’t complicated, but it is sequential. Clarity on where the business is going comes first. Operations and leadership follow. The transaction comes last, when the business is actually ready for it.

That sequence is the practice: Plan, Transform, Transact. Most owners start with one. Very few need all three at once.

Three disciplines

All three point at the same outcome: the one you’ve worked years to earn.

Each discipline stands on its own. They’re also built to run in sequence, and the order is where the value comes from.

Plan

Exit planning · Strategy

Clarity on where the business is going, and a disciplined roadmap to get there. Grounded in financial reality and executable from day one.

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01 · Plan

Every good outcome begins with clarity.

We start with what you want from your life, then define what the business has to deliver to make it possible.

  • Owner vision, goals, and timing
  • Valuation, value gap, and readiness
  • A quarterly roadmap with names and dates

Transform

EOS · Operational excellence

Operational improvement that builds enterprise value, closing the gap between what the business produces today and what it could, with a leadership team aligned to deliver it.

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02 · Transform

As your leaders go, so goes the company.

A valuable business needs strong operations and a healthy leadership team. As a Professional EOS Implementer, I run the Entrepreneurial Operating System with your leadership team, pushing your vision and your plan down through the company every year and every quarter.

  • Leadership aligned on one vision
  • Accountability built into the week
  • Value built and risk reduced, quarter by quarter

Transact

M&A · Capital · Transition

Transaction execution across sales, acquisitions, divestitures, and capital raises. More than a hundred completed deals, on your side of the table.

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03 · Transact

One chance to get it right.

When the business is strong and the vision is clear, you’re ready. We weigh the real options together, and I lead the process as your advisor.

  • Sales, divestitures, and buyer positioning
  • Growth capital, recapitalizations, and owner liquidity
  • Acquisitions, shareholder transactions, and ownership transitions

Select any card to see what each discipline involves.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

— paraphrased from Albert Einstein, 1933

Most owners should have six advisors: an attorney, an accountant, a wealth manager, an exit planner, an implementer, and an investment banker. Most have the first three. We are the other three, and we pull all six disciplines together to work on your behalf.

That is a lot of moving parts, so we made being a great owner as simple as it can be without making it simpler. We respect an entrepreneur’s three scarcest resources: time, capital, and energy. The process asks about a week of your time a year. You pay only for work you find valuable. And it is built to give you energy back rather than spend it.

“The work went well beyond structuring meetings. He helped me navigate complex issues with my management team and work through essentials like securing loans and approaching investment.”
Daniel B. · Co-Founder & CEO, TEG

Why I do this

I’m a fourth-generation entrepreneur. All four of my grandparents ran their own businesses, my dad runs one, and he and I still run the small business his father started. Every one of them retired without ever selling, and I questioned that silently for years.

Then I became an investment banker, and I didn’t fit. At a bank, what’s best for the owner and what’s best for the bank aren’t always the same thing. I kept choosing the owner. That’s a problem there. It isn’t one here.

So in 2019 I started my own firm to prove it could be done differently, first as RedShift Advisors, now as Lower Middle Market Advisors, because the name should say plainly who we serve.

COVID showed me the rest. I spent that year doing emergency exit planning, trying to fix in weeks what should have been fixed years earlier. That sent me to the Exit Planning Institute, and then to EOS, because my best clients all ran on it. Twenty years and more than a hundred transactions later, the firm is those three disciplines in one practice: the plan, the operating discipline, and the deal.

Here’s how I work: I collect information, take time to understand how things actually work, and make changes that improve results. If it isn’t broken, I don’t fix it. (Kolbe 7-5-3-6, if you speak that language.)

How we work

Our core values.

These aren’t wall decorations. They’re the standard we hire against, the standard we hold each other to, and the reason clients get the same firm on month twenty that they got on day one.

Lower Middle Market Advisors
01

GOATS Only

  • Great character, great personality, great at the craft
  • All three, every team member. No exceptions
02

Lead. Follow and Trust.

  • Lead the industry, and in your seat, you lead
  • Follow whoever’s best in the moment
  • Trust is earned and protected
03

Built to Win

  • Healthy, rested, and prepared
  • A clear vision and a clear plan
  • Organized, measured, and executed well
04

Audacious and Relentless

  • Goals set high enough to require change
  • Focus narrow enough to reach them
  • Drive hard enough to finish
05

Fail Forward

  • The smartest play: not the safest, not the wildest
  • Decide, move, and learn from what happens
  • Explain a decision. Never apologize for a good one
“Looking back over the first seven months, I think one of the most important exercises we completed was developing our core values. This has been instrumental in the employee and culture transitions.”
Matthew Gaus · NIM Broker

We run on EOS.

Lower Middle Market Advisors runs on EOS. Anthony sits in the Visionary seat, Sarah is our Integrator, and we hold the same meeting rhythm and set the same quarterly Rocks we ask of your leadership team. We ask nothing of you that we do not do ourselves.

We Run on EOS, with an Implementer

Common questions

What owners ask first.

Working together

No. Most of our work begins years before a transaction, and that’s the point. The decisions that determine what a business is worth are made long before a buyer is at the table. Many owners start in the Plan phase with no sale date in mind at all.

Eighteen to twenty-four months before a transaction is the minimum useful runway. Three to five years gives you room to close a meaningful value gap. Earlier is better for the same reason it is in investing: results compound. Each quarter’s gains become the base for the next, and higher cash flow means larger distributions to owners along the way.

Rarely. Most owners start where the pressure is: unclear direction, a leadership team that isn’t aligned, a need for capital, or an offer already on the table. The work is scoped to that. The three disciplines run in sequence when a business needs the full journey, not by default.

Most owners see significant results within about six months. A leadership team usually needs about two years before it runs the operating system without me. Planning continues for as long as you own the business.

We give away the planning process. The first conversation and the 90-minute EOS meeting are free, and help between sessions costs nothing extra.

Beyond that, Plan is $12,000 a year and EOS sessions are $3,500 each. Neither requires a contract, and both are guaranteed: if you don’t receive value greater than our fees, don’t pay us.

Transact is different. Fees are generally contingent on the successful completion of a transaction and priced against the average in the current Firmex Middle Market Fee Study. Investment banking services require an engagement agreement.

Credentials and coverage

CEPA stands for Certified Exit Planning Advisor, a credential from the Exit Planning Institute. The training covers how to align an owner’s business, personal, and financial goals around a single plan. We are all human, and we all exit. The work is making sure that when it happens, on whatever timeline, it delivers what you want from the rest of your life.

An EOS Implementer is trained to run the Entrepreneurial Operating System, a practical framework for getting a leadership team aligned and accountable. It is the toolset behind the Transform phase: one shared vision, clear ownership of every seat, and a meeting rhythm that surfaces problems while they are still small.

I hold FINRA Series 7, 63, and 79 licenses, with twenty years and more than a hundred completed transactions behind them. Most exit planners and implementers cannot execute a transaction. They hand you off. Most bankers were never in the room for the years of work that made the business worth buying. Holding all three seats means the plan, the operating discipline, and the deal are built by the same person.

For Plan and Transform, we work with owners we believe in: the person, the plan, and real demand in the market for what they sell. That is the whole filter. Most of our clients have between 10 and 250 employees.

For Transact, we generally lead deals worth $5 million to $100 million, with exceptions in both directions. Capital raises can be considerably smaller, depending on what the business needs at the time.

Lower Middle Market Advisors is based in Pittsburgh, with an office in Cranberry Township and team members living in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. We work with owners across those states and in Michigan, New York, Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia, plus nationwide where the fit is right.

Get in touch

Start with a conversation.

Tell me where the business is today and what you want the next few years to look like. The first conversation is free, and it commits you to nothing.

Email
anthony@LMMAdvisors.com
Phone
412-510-9056
Based in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Serving
PA · OH · WV · MI · NY · DC · MD · VA, plus nationwide

Everything shared here is treated as confidential.