There's a quiet assumption behind most company sales: that the hard part is finding a buyer. After 25 years and more than 200 closed transactions in payments, fintech, and vertical SaaS, I can tell you it isn't. Finding a buyer is easy. Finding the right one before they find you, and getting them to compete, is the entire job.
Selling your company is not a listing. It's a search.
The buyer already in your inbox is rarely your best outcome
Most founders open a process with one or two parties already circling. A competitor has made overtures. A private equity firm has been "keeping in touch." Those conversations feel like momentum, and they are the most common way founders leave money on the table. The buyer who came to you set the anchor, knows you haven't run a process, and has every incentive to move fast and quiet before anyone else looks. The best outcome usually comes from a strategic buyer two steps outside your obvious niche, the one who sees your platform as the missing piece in theirs and pays for that strategic value, not the comps.
The right buyer is found, not waited for
Reaching that buyer is a process, not luck, and it has three parts. First, a real thesis: who acquires a company like yours, and why, broken down by buyer category and the specific value each one is buying. Second, a wide and specific outreach list built from that thesis, not a generic teaser blast. Third, competitive tension, meaning enough live buyers running in parallel that price holds through diligence instead of eroding the moment one party senses it's alone. Most broken processes fail on the third point. A single bidder always finds a reason to retrade.
Why a boutique beats a big bank in the lower-middle market
733Park focuses on companies with enterprise values from $2M to $350M, most often between $2M and $80M. In that range, a bulge-bracket bank staffs your deal with a team you rarely see, led by a junior associate, because your fee is a rounding error to them. A boutique is the opposite trade. You get the person who has done this 200+ times working your deal directly, on every call and every negotiation. Sector focus compounds it: when an advisor lives in payments, fintech, and vertical SaaS, the buyer map is already in their head and the diligence playbook is already written. That's why our process closes roughly 80% of the deals we take to market.
Start before you need to
The best time to build your buyer map is 12 to 24 months before you intend to sell. That window lets you clean financials, sharpen the metrics each buyer category rewards, and position the story around what a strategic acquirer will actually pay a premium for. Founders who wait until they need a deal run the process at the worst possible leverage.
If you're a payments, fintech, or vertical SaaS founder thinking about an exit, the search starts long before the sale. Happy to compare notes.
Lane Gordon is the founder of 733Park, a boutique M&A advisory firm for payments, fintech, AI, and vertical SaaS companies. 733Park.com