Most founders only sell a business once. The people sitting across the table have done it dozens of times. That asymmetry is where deals get won or lost, and after twenty-plus years working inside it, I can tell you the gap is almost always larger than founders expect.

I started thinking about negotiation early. My degree at Cornell was in collective bargaining, an unusual choice that forced me to study how leverage actually works. Who has it, where it comes from, how it shifts during a process, and what it costs to give up. The frameworks I learned then still shape how I run a deal today.

After Cornell, I joined the technology group at Credit Suisse First Boston as an investment banking analyst, working on large-cap tech transactions. From there I moved to American Capital, where I spent two years as an associate on the buy side. That seat matters more to my work today than anything else on my resume. Sitting in those rooms, watching how acquirers think, what they look for, and where they expect sellers to fold, made it obvious how rarely founders were getting matched judgment on their side of the table.

I founded Potomac in 2003 to fix that. The bet was simple: the best outcomes come from disciplined process, deep buyer knowledge, and the willingness to tell clients the truth. Most M&A advisors get paid to close deals. I built Potomac to get paid for the right deal, even when that means slowing things down or telling a founder something they don’t want to hear.

In our core verticals, Potomac now advises on more sell-side transactions than any other firm in the world. I’ve personally executed more pest control transactions than any advisor on the planet, including the European antitrust divestitures on the $7 billion Rentokil Initial and Terminix merger. The work compounds. Knowing how the largest acquirers in our markets behave, across every kind of deal, gives founders an edge that can’t be shortcut.

I run masterclasses on Potomac TV because most founders learn how M&A actually works at the worst possible moment, when they’re already deep in a process. The more they understand before they pick up the phone, the better the outcome. That principle is the whole reason Potomac exists.