Charlotte M&A firm · Since 2005
You spent thirty years building it. Selling it takes nine months and one good advisor.
Hillandale is an advisor and investor to founder-led businesses in the Carolinas. We have been on your side of the table — we own companies too.
Here is the part most advisors will not say out loud: the first offer an owner receives is almost never the best one available, and it usually arrives unsolicited from a buyer who already knows exactly what the business is worth.
You do not. That asymmetry is the whole game, and it is the reason we exist.
I have bought dozens of companies, run three, and sold four. I have sat through the diligence request lists, the retrade attempt at week eleven, the quality-of-earnings report that found something nobody expected. When I tell you a number is achievable, it is because I have paid it or been paid it.
Before we talk about hiring anybody, get the number. It is free, it takes two weeks, and if the answer is “not yet” we will tell you that instead of opening a process.
How a sale actually runs
Valuation
Comps, transactions, a range. The free part.
Clean-up
Financials, concentration, owner dependence.
Buyer list
From our 10,000-company NC database, by name.
Market
Deck, conversations, competing LOIs.
Diligence
Quality of earnings. Where deals die.
Close
Wire clears. We are still on the phone after.
Why believe any of this
Four claims, all checkable.
Private North Carolina businesses in a database we built ourselves — 19 industries, 716 sub-industries. Your buyer list comes out of it, not out of a subscription every other advisor also pays for.
Investing in and valuing private companies. Aiwyn AI, where we were early, was valued at $440 million in KKR’s and Bessemer’s round.
Owners, operators and investors in the Private Business Roundtable. Ask any of them what we are like to work with before you call us.
Horizon Roofing, Touchstone Electric, Polysonics, Datavations, Sidekick Therapy. We own trades businesses. We know what a real gross margin looks like.