Should I Use an Investment Bank or a Boutique M&A Advisor to Sell My Company?

If your company is worth $500 million or more, hire the investment bank. If it is worth between $5 million and $350 million, you will almost always get a better process and a better outcome from a boutique M&A advisor, because at that size you are the smallest deal on the bank's sheet and your process gets handed to an associate.

That is the honest answer, and it comes down to one question: who actually works on your deal?

The economics of attention

Large investment banks are built around large fees. A bank running $2 billion mandates cannot afford to put its senior bankers on a $40 million deal. The math does not work for them. So the managing director shows up for the pitch, wins the engagement, and then the file moves down the hall to a vice president or an associate a few years out of school. That person may be smart and hardworking. They have also never sold a company that looks like yours, and they are juggling six other files.

You will feel this in the details. Slower responses to buyers. A generic buyer list pulled from a database. A confidential information memorandum that reads like it was assembled from a template, because it was. When a serious acquirer asks a hard question about your revenue concentration or your residual portfolio, the person answering has to check with someone else first.

What a boutique actually does differently

At a boutique firm, the senior person who pitched you runs the deal. At 733Park, that means clients work directly with me. I make the buyer calls. I sit in the management meetings. I negotiate the letter of intent. Twenty-five years of payments, fintech, and software M&A experience is applied to your transaction, not summarized in a pitch deck and then delegated.

Specialization compounds the advantage. A generalist bank covers everything from industrials to healthcare. A specialist boutique lives in a handful of sectors and knows the buyers personally: who is acquiring right now, what they will pay a premium for, which ones retrade at the eleventh hour, and which ones close clean. We have facilitated more than $10 billion in transaction volume across 209+ deals. That track record exists because we know which deals to take on and which buyers to put in the room.

Where the big bank wins

Fair is fair. If you are selling a business at $500 million or more, a bulge bracket or large middle-market bank brings balance sheet services, global coverage teams, and institutional relationships that matter at that scale. At that size you are the deal the senior bankers want, and you will get their attention.

The problem is the wide middle. Founders with companies worth $5 million to $350 million often assume the bigger name means a bigger outcome. In practice it usually means being deprioritized. Your company is likely the largest asset you own. The person selling it should treat it that way.

Three questions to ask any firm you interview

1. Who, by name, will run my process day to day, and how many other active deals do they have?
2. How many companies in my specific sector have you sold, and can I speak to those founders?
3. What percentage of the deals you take to market actually close?

The answers separate firms that sell companies like yours from firms that sell pitch decks.

The bottom line

Match the advisor to the deal. At $500 million, hire the bank. At $5 million to $350 million, hire the specialist boutique where the senior dealmaker who won your business is the one on the phone with buyers. Most of our engagements close within four to six months of kickoff, and nothing gets handed off.

If you want a starting point on what your company might be worth, run the numbers through our free valuation calculator at 733park.com/tools/portfolio-valuation, or reach out for a confidential conversation at 733park.com/contact.