Salt Creek Advisory is a family business that sells family businesses. I started it in October 2025, and my brother joined this past summer. That's not a branding line, it's the org chart. There's no layer of managing directors between us and the client, because there are only two of us running deals.
We work the lower middle market, sell-side only, with companies anywhere from about two million to seventy-five million in revenue. A good amount of what we're working on right now is in early childhood education, preschool operators in particular, alongside other family-owned and founder-owned businesses. Every one of them is run by someone who spent decades building the thing and is now trying to figure out how to hand it off, or cash out of it, without losing what made it valuable in the first place. That's a different job than advising a PE-backed portfolio company on its third add-on. It requires more patience, more explaining, and a lot more listening before you start talking about multiples.
At a bigger bank, the partner sells you on the pitch, then a team of associates you've never met runs your process. For most owners, this sale is the only one they'll ever do, they don't get a second attempt to pick a better banker next time. So the person on the first call needs to be the person negotiating the final purchase agreement. The owner is trusting us with the sale of something they spent decades building, and that trust doesn't survive a handoff.
That's why we built it this way: no junior staff running point, no handoffs mid-process. Buyer development covers strategics, family offices, and private equity, and my brother and I are on every call ourselves, same two people doing the work from the first conversation onward.