business-valuation
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Himanshu Anand and the business of being useful
After engineering, technology and investment banking, Himanshu Anand founded Anplify to help other people execute their deals. His story turns on a practical question: who does the work before the handshake?
Christopher Cook and the business of letting go
A beach in Maui prompted Christopher Cook to rethink a 20-year corporate career. At Lionheart, the Vancouver adviser now asks business owners to build companies that can thrive beyond their own daily intervention.
Sean McCloskey took the long way to the family business
Before joining the firm his father founded, Sean McCloskey built a career of his own. At Tax & Financial Group, that outside experience now meets the very personal business of helping owners decide what comes next.
Patrick Donohue and the value of staying in charge
A ten-cent lemonade stand came first. Now Patrick Donohue finances owner-led businesses and asks a deceptively difficult question: how do you build something valuable while keeping the freedom to decide its future?
OffDeal
OffDeal is an AI-native investment bank that helps owners of small and lower-middle-market businesses sell their companies faster and for better prices. It pairs in-house human M&A advisors with proprietary software that automates the analyst-level grunt work - deal sourcing, buyer research, financial analysis, and transaction documents - so bankers can focus on strategy and closing. OffDeal targets an underserved segment (roughly $10-100M in revenue, $1-10M EBITDA) using a flat success-fee model instead of the retainers charged by traditional banks.
Baton
Baton is a New York-based online marketplace that helps owners sell their small businesses and helps buyers acquire them. It replaces the slow, opaque world of traditional business brokers with fast data-driven valuations, confidential listings, digital data rooms, and guided M&A support - achieving a roughly 70% close rate at about half the cost of conventional brokers.
Chat Joglekar
Chat Joglekar is the co-founder and CEO of Baton, a New York marketplace that wants to be the Zillow for small businesses - giving Main Street owners fast, data-backed valuations and a private way to sell. Before Baton he spent two decades building $100M+ businesses inside Zillow, Spotify and Google. In January 2025 Baton raised a $10M Series A led by Obvious Ventures, with backing from Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, pushing total funding past $15.5M as the company chases a roughly $10 trillion wave of retiring-boomer business transitions.
Justin Johnson
Justin Johnson, CFA, is Senior Managing Director and Co-CEO of Valuation Research Corporation (VRC), a national valuation and advisory firm founded in 1975. He built VRC's San Francisco office from scratch into one of the firm's leading practices, with a deep focus on private equity funds and their portfolio companies. Since August 2017 he has shared the chief executive seat with PJ Patel, splitting the country between them - Johnson runs the West Coast and Central regions while staying hands-on in technical work on solvency opinions, fairness opinions, and complex securities valuation.