Management teams and business owners come to us for guidance at key milestones of their journeys, when they face complex deal‑related challenges, are considering their strategic options, or are making long‑term growth plans. Our Advisory team is skilled and seasoned in guiding our clients through these issues.
Our Advisory team has the experience, expertise, and grit to architect appropriate deal-driven solutions, execute on them, and deliver exceptional outcomes. We are one of the largest independent firms in the country, with staff who are some of the most creative, dynamic, and thoughtful deal-makers active in capital markets today.
Your expertise is in managing and operating your business. Ours is developing and executing an exit strategy that guides you to an outcome that exceeds your expectations. The best way to sell your business is to stay focused on running it and increasing value while we manage the sale process. We specialize in structuring M&A deals that meaningfully change the course of Canadian mid-market companies. Our M&A Sell-Side Advisory team guides business owners through the sale process for transactions up to $500M.
We've built and refined a technology-driven, bespoke process to guide private, owner-operated businesses through the complexities of a sale and conclude a transaction at a compelling value on favourable terms. We focus on critical questions to help you prepare for an exit, understand the potential risks and rewards, and navigate selling your business for maximum value to international strategics or leading private equity firms. From developing a strategic exit plan and preparing the marketing materials to conducting due diligence on approved potential buyers, we support you during this critical stage of your business lifecycle.
Our Corporate Development as a Service (CDaaS) offering is a specialized buy-side advisory service.
In September 2022, we spun out CDaaS as its own entity and brand (Spearhead Corporate Development), to reflect its global scope and focus. Spearhead’s Corporate Development as a Service (CDaaS) advises buy-side investment teams at some of the most acquisitive strategics and PE firms in the world. We empower them to close more M&A deals, by supercharging their top‑of‑the‑deal‑funnel coverage and efforts worldwide.
The outcome is a consistent and predictable pipeline of highly qualified deals, which allows corporate development leaders to focus on negotiating and closing more deals.
“Data/AI centricity” is crucial to future-proofing a business: not only does it enable the upside, but it also defends against competitors/upstarts. Our Data & Artificial Intelligence team turns data into a strategic advantage for our clients. These analytics are compelling for businesses of all sizes. However, access to this service can feel out-of-reach for many smaller and mid-market companies. That’s why we bring those data strategies and techniques to mid-market companies.
Our team uses big data analytics to create operational efficiencies and produce valuation step changes, often ahead of significant M&A activity or financings.
Oren Horovitz reached out to me asking for the permission to do a quick exploratory mandate, and he promised that by the end of the mandate, we would have actionable insights and a dashboard in place that would allow our team to grow our business more intelligently. Fast forward a few weeks and we had the dashboard. Since that time, our salespeople have had a tool in their hands, that helps them understand which clients they should be reaching out to in order to up-sell and cross-sell more intelligently. We've been growing the tool, adding more features and functionality, incorporating more data so that now we've got profit and consumer effort scoring all built in.
It's a great tool and I'm confident that it'll help us grow our company intelligently and quickly.
We chose FirePower over a lot of other banks and it proved to be the right decision. We were impressed with the M&A team’s grit; they worked very hard and drummed up a lot of interest in our company. Throughout the sales process, Al and Evan were there for us, helping us craft the story and taking work off our plates. It really felt like a partnership.
There are banks that just want to get a deal done, and there are banks that make sure they get a good deal for their clients: FirePower is definitely the latter. There is no question that we will work with Al and his team on future transactions.
My initial discussion with FirePower goes back years, I met with their team when my partner and I were at the early stages of considering an ownership transition. We spent a lot of time getting to know the team and understanding their thoughts on what the sale process would look like. Now that we’re all sitting on the other end of the process, I can say with certainty that the FirePower team overdelivered on everything they said they would do; they ran a thorough process to identify and work with potential partners, and they dug in through several challenges, not the least of which was the pandemic. They were the right advisor for our process and I recommend anyone in the lower mid-market give them a call.
The Firepower M&A Advisory team was a pleasure to work with. They made sure we had a thorough understanding of the sale process right from the start. The team compiled an extensive worldwide list of prospective acquirers, and after considerable work, found us a strategic buyer that fit with our objectives. This was no easy feat, given the firm parameters we’d set out defining the right buyer: one who would embrace the culture of our company, be aligned with our existing values, support our current management team, leverage our relationships with our vendor partners, and allow us to retire.
At all times, we were well supported by Alan and his team, which made the process much easier than anticipated. I am happy to recommend Firepower to anyone who is looking to sell their business.
We engaged FirePower to support our acquisition strategy: expanding verticals, adding scale to operations and strengthening F12’s presence nationally. As it turned out, we couldn’t have asked for a more hardworking team. FirePower’s perseverance building relationships with prospective targets, either directly or through their advisors, helped create awareness of F12’s interest in acquiring strong companies across Canada.
When we created the Chill Brothers we knew M&A would be a priority as part of our growth. We wanted to move quickly and started working with Spearhead to identify the universe and accelerate introductions to owners of HVAC companies in Texas. They wasted no time getting us in front of quality, ready-to-sell targets which led us to closing our first deal in 188 days with line of sight to a few more.
We had a well-defined, small universe for Creative Outdoor Advertising (COA) looking at acquisition opportunities in the street furniture marketing space. We were focused on running the day-to-day operations and engaged Spearhead to scale our M&A outreach and relationship-building efforts. We were very happy with their ability to connect with these targets and within 240 days we had our first deal closed and have a few others in our sights. The entire team has been incredible to work with and essentially became an extension of COA.
Great job to the entire team!
