From Advisor to Seller: Lessons from Both Sides of the M&A Process

When you’re running a business, selling it is usually the furthest thing from your mind. But whether it happens after a few years or a few decades, most founders eventually face the question of what comes next and what it means to hand off something they spent years growing.

CLA (CliftonLarsonAllen LLP) has long helped entrepreneurs work through that question. One of the country’s leading professional services firms, CLA supports business owners across wealth advisory, digital, audit, tax, consulting, and outsourcing with a philosophy centered around knowing clients deeply and staying with them through every stage of ownership. Earlier this year, CLA expanded that work by welcoming Meridian Capital into the firm, adding significantly more investment banking and M&A advisory services to what it can offer entrepreneurs navigating major financial decisions.

Brian Murphy, now managing principal of investment banking at CLA Meridian Capital, and Patrick Ringland, now principal and managing director of CLA Meridian Capital, spent the last decade-plus leading Meridian through significant growth. The firm was founded 31 years ago by former entrepreneurs who understood the founder experience firsthand and wanted to create an advisory practice that reflected it. That ethos is now part of CLA.

Here, Murphy and Ringland discuss the most common elements they saw owners experience and struggle with throughout the selling process, and whether all of that helped prepare them to navigate their own shifts in identity, control, and legacy.

What to expect when selling your business

After decades of advising sellers, Murphy and Ringland have a clear view of what founders typically encounter. The first thing that catches people off guard is the sheer volume of work involved. “You’ve got a full-time job running your company, and then you try to sell your company on top of it,” Ringland says. “The complexity of your life’s work wrapped up into a company, and then trying to move that through a transaction is just hard.”

The emotional side is something founders tend to underestimate as well, even when someone tells them to expect it. “My wife jokes that I’m a counselor who is good at finance, because so much of our role when working with our clients is being an emotional guide,” Ringland says.

Murphy points to a third area where founders often need help: understanding the full range of options available to them. Most assume the choice is binary: keep the business or sell it entirely. The right answer is often somewhere in between. “At least 50% of scenarios, the right solution that meets their goals is often in the middle,” Murphy says. “It’s not keeping or selling 100% of the business.” Partial sales, minority recapitalizations, and structured partnerships are all real possibilities, and the right structure depends entirely on what a founder wants their life to look like after the deal closes.

When the advisors became the sellers

For the first time in their careers, Murphy and Ringland found themselves on the other side of the table. When Meridian’s own conversations with CLA began, they brought more context to the process than almost any seller could. Decades of advising founders gave them a detailed map of what to expect. What they found was that having the map and walking the road are genuinely different things.

“Even though I knew exactly what to expect, when it’s your own baby, the way you feel about it is different,” Ringland says. That experience has given the pair a deeper well to draw from with clients.

For Murphy, the process clarified how much joining CLA could enhance their client services and vice versa. The strategic fit was evident early. Both firms serve the same kinds of clients, go to market with the same industry-focused approach, and share a culture Ringland describes as genuinely collaborative and unpretentious. “There was a good cultural fit that gave us a lot of peace in our decision to move forward,” he says.

CLA also approached the conversations with humility. Despite being a firm of nearly 9,300 people, they came in with a genuine openness to learning. “They gave us too much credit,” Ringland says, “but they really said, tell us what you need. We want you to run it.” That kind of autonomy was a significant part of what made the decision feel right.

For founders who are navigating the identity questions a sale tends to raise, Ringland offers a perspective from his own experience. “What helped me the most was zooming out as far as possible from my role at Meridian to my role as a human,” he says. “Every time I zoomed out, I felt much more at ease with my decision.” When the professional questions got loud, stepping back into the full picture of life as a parent, a professional, and a person with values beyond a title helped bring clarity back.

What makes a great deal outcome?

Murphy and Ringland are consistent on this point. The financial outcome must make sense. That’s the baseline, but what separates a good deal from a great one goes further than the numbers. “You also need a great emotional outcome for it to be a great deal,” Ringland says.

Cultural and strategic alignment from day one is what creates the conditions for that, they say. Markets shift and circumstances change, but if both sides are genuinely moving in the same direction at the start, the foundation holds. For Meridian, that alignment with CLA was clear from early in the process.

“It’s an acceleration of our mission and vision, not necessarily a holistic change,” Murphy says.

What CLA Meridian Capital can do for entrepreneurs

For a founder who is approaching a major transaction, pulling together the right team can feel overwhelming on top of everything else already on your plate. Tax planning, estate planning, quality of earnings work, wealth management, and investment banking have historically required separate relationships, separate conversations, and a lot of coordination. CLA Meridian Capital changes that. “To have all those capabilities in-house, available more seamlessly, and being able to bundle those, that’s a more powerful offering,” Murphy says.

CLA has professionals across the U.S., so founders get advisors who genuinely know their market. “The ability to mine the knowledge base of 9,300 employees across the country who are smart, capable, and hard-working is pretty big,” Ringland says. A question that once required going out to a network can now be answered quickly with local knowledge.

There’s also something founders rarely get from an advisory relationship: a project manager for the entire process. From preparing for a transaction to executing it, and beyond to planning what comes after, CLA Meridian Capital can quarterback the work. The goal, as Ringland describes it, is to be the team that brings founders quality options, with a bench deep enough to handle most of what the process requires in one place.

For professional services firms considering their own next chapter, the CLA model is worth understanding. The Meridian acquisition reflects a broader CLA approach that gives entrepreneurial teams the autonomy to continue growing what they started, with the support of a much larger platform behind them.

Click here to learn more about how CLA helps founders sell their business for a successful outcome.

CLA Meridian Capital is the investment banking division of CliftonLarsonAllen Wealth Advisors, LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor and broker dealer, member FINRA/SIPC.