Our Mission
Our Mission is to help entrepreneurs achieve financial freedom through small business acquisition by providing them with education, capital and support.
When retiring owners sell their business to a self-funded searcher backed by SHV, they know that their legacy, and remaining team, are left in long-term oriented, conservative, well-run, safe and capable hands. Instead of selling to a private equity that will over-leverage and gut your business, sell to an entrepreneur who will keep the business locally owned and operated, while benefiting from SHV’s world-class support and resources.
America’s Quiet Crisis — And a Simple, Profitable Solution
If you spend enough time reading history—or any data on the American Economy—you’ll come to the same conclusion: small businesses are the backbone of this country. They always have been.
There are more than 6 million small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. today. Many of them are family-run, community-rooted, and proudly independent. But there’s a looming issue we can’t ignore: the owners are getting older, and they’re ready to retire.
So the question becomes: What will Main Street look like in 10-20 years? Will Wall Street buy Main Street, with private equity firms swooping in, buying these businesses at scale with leverage and short-term flips in mind, rolling them up into bigger and bigger nationalized platforms? We know their playbook: consolidate, cut costs, raise prices, and squeeze every penny of profit, often at the expense of employees, customers, and communities. Or will the baton passes to the next generation of local operators? Folks who understand the business and live it day in and day out, operating it with pride, and playing an outsized personal role in their local communities? People who know their customers by name. Owners who are motivated by pride, not just profits. We prefer the second path.
What We Stand For
At our core, we believe in independent ownership, thriving communities, and the enduring power of American entrepreneurship. We’re not here to reinvent the wheel. We’re here to make sure it keeps turning in the hands of people who care — this is a legacy worth defending. America didn’t become the most prosperous country on earth by accident. It happened because people were willing to bet on themselves, with small business and entrepreneurial activity at our core.
A Gap in the Market
Now here’s the rub: when a small business owner wants to retire, they usually have two bad options.
They can sell to private equity, take a decent check, and watch everything they built get restructured into oblivion. Or they can sell to a local operator—someone who understands the business and wants to grow it the right way—but often that person can’t get the capital. That’s the disconnect. The people with the skills to run these businesses don’t have the cash. And the people with the cash often don’t have a clue how to run a dry cleaner, a dental practice, or a HVAC shop. We’re here to fix that.
How SHV Helps
We connect committed, capable operators with the education, capital and support they need to buy and grow great businesses. We help investors support the future of Main Street, and we ensure the legacy of retiring owners lives on in good hands. We count our success not by spreadsheets or stock tickers, but by how many businesses remain locally owned, operated with integrity, and able to continue to serve their communities.
If you think the Little League team should still be sponsored by the local pizza joint—not a faceless conglomerate—and if you believe that opportunity should be earned, not inherited, then we’d love to work with you.
If you'd like to learn more about SHV, or share a deal, please get in touch!
“Find your road to walk and your reason to walk it.“
— Jay Gould
