4 years ago our founding team started in M&A — I want to share everything we’ve learned since and what we’re doing today.

It all started with our sell-side business brokerage.

Running that company gave us tons of exposure to the micro M&A market.

We saw every little thing a first-time acquirer struggles with from deal sourcing to a signed purchase agreement.

What we noticed was that there were TONS of great operators with relevant industry experience, highly qualified to run their target acquisition.

But... they struggled with fundraising.

We saw broken deal after broken deal because of their inability to raise equity.

Most of these operators do not have $300k - $1M+ in their bank account for a down payment.

OR they didn’t have relationships with investors who could help them fund it.

Which is interesting, because many of the “traditional acquirers” we saw from PE/IB/consulting backgrounds rarely had trouble fundraising.

They worked around wealthy people, organically built relationships with them, and when it came time to raise money they essentially just had to ask.

So guess what happens?

Brokers start prioritizing the traditional buyers with low execution risk. (aka – access to capital)

Which means the more qualified operators start losing deals just because someone else knows more wealthy people.

I believe this is massively unfair.

If you have the best skills to operate, if you are the best person to lead employees whose livelihoods depend on the business, if you are the best operator to pay off the seller note, and your offer is equivalent to anyone else’s…

You should win the deal every time.

So we asked ourselves, what if we could help great operators raise capital for SMBs?

Is it possible to remove the barrier to capital and enable the most talented to succeed?

This set us on our journey to build Mainshares.com, a platform designed for raising capital for SMB acquisitions and managing investors post-acquisition.

We are trying to solve a massive problem facing the U.S. SMB market.

Today, 60M Americans work across 6M SMBs and account for 44% of GDP.

Baby boomers own 41% of these companies and will be retiring in the next###-###-#### years.

If these businesses are going to be transferred to the next generation of entrepreneurs, the wealth transfer would be roughly $11 trillion.

Right now, the investment rails to keep up with that volume does not exist.

  • There’s plenty of M&A educators
  • Plenty of M&A MBA programs on the rise
  • ETA communities are popping up all over the country
  • Many operators attracted to buying a business
  • Even tech communities see the value in acquisitions

Yet there is no real ecosystem or infrastructure to support the massive demand we will see over the next 10 years.

Our goal is to unlock the potential of this asset class to empower the next generation of operators and investors who will lead and invest in our country’s small business community.