The Shoemaker's Kids

I've spent years telling founders and CEOs the same thing before we ever get near a term sheet: nobody buys a static asset. Buyers pay for momentum. They want to see a pipeline that's growing, a story that's getting sharper, and other serious parties circling — because scarcity and competition create real value. The balance sheet alone rarely does.

I've watched this play out directly. I ran the M&A process that sold SmartLogic. The first offer on the table was $14 million. I spent the next year doing exactly what I just described — rebuilding the pipeline, sharpening the story, creating real competitive tension among a wider group of serious buyers. The deal closed at $27 million. Same company, same underlying business — nearly double the price, because the market was looking at momentum instead of a static asset sitting still.

Here's what I keep noticing, working around boutique investment banks specifically: almost no investment bank does this for themselves.

You know this playbook better than I do — it's your job. You've spent decades telling clients: don't just wait for the right buyer to notice you, show them growth, show them activity, show them that other people want in. And yet walk into most boutique M&A shops today — firms with real history, real relationships, sometimes forty or fifty years of reputation behind them — and you'll often find something that looks a lot like the shoemaker's own kids going barefoot.

"The one thing you'd never let a client's business look like from the outside is exactly how your own firm looks: quiet."

I want to be precise about what I mean here, because it's easy to overstate. I don't think most boutique bankers actively engineer their own pipeline the way I'm about to describe — and to be fair, it isn't standard practice to continuously rebuild your own growth trajectory the way you'd advise a client to. Most firms assume their pipeline is whatever it is, and they operate off the deal flow that shows up. That's not a criticism. It's just not the muscle the job usually builds. Understanding, intellectually, that pipeline and momentum drive value is not the same skill as actually engineering that improvement — deal by deal, relationship by relationship, on a real timeline. That's a distinct discipline. It happens to be the one I specialize in.

And here's the part that should be encouraging, not discouraging: the hardest piece of this used to be lead generation — finding the names, finding the openings, finding companies that may be interested in an M&A discussion. That part is easier today than it's ever been. AI has made finding hundreds of potentially interested prospects faster than any of us could have built by hand a decade ago.

"The gap isn't finding opportunities anymore. The gap is converting them."

That's a different skill than origination, and it's one most rainmakers were never asked to build, because for most of a career, reputation alone did the sourcing.

This is the work I do, across industries, as a fractional corporate development executive: step into a business, prepare them for a sale and the deep analysis and diligence that is coming, rebuild the pipeline when needed, sharpen the story, run the process, and drive it to a close — the same discipline that took SmartLogic from $14 million to $27 million. I do this for technology companies and professional services firms today. There's an obvious, underserved case for doing exactly this inside boutique investment banks. You are, structurally, precisely the kind of client this discipline is built for. You just don't usually get offered the service — because you're usually the one delivering it to everyone else.

If any of this sounds familiar — if you know your firm's history is worth more than its current trajectory suggests, and you're not entirely sure how to close that gap yourself — I'd welcome the conversation.

— Jeff Laughlin, RCG International