Strategic Advisory. Meaningful Outcomes.

CBH has been around a lot longer than most people assume, and it did not begin as a brokerage. It began as an accounting firm, and the letters are the initials of the three accountants who founded it — one of them Richard Bradley, who is still here. Partners came and went across the decades. The name stayed, and so did the work: sit down with an owner and tell them the truth about their numbers.

Somewhere in those years, one of the clients was a garage door company. George Hastings built Hastings Garage Doors into one of the largest in the Southeast, and Richard kept his books. For years the two of them sat on the same side of the same table — one running the business, the other keeping the numbers straight enough to prove what it was worth.

He sold it in December 2006. Within months, the housing market a garage door company lives on had come apart. That is not luck — it is what it looks like when someone reads their own numbers honestly and is willing to sell while things are still good. And here is the part that still matters most to us: those trucks are still on the road today. The company outlived the sale. The people kept their jobs. The name stayed on the doors.

That is the outcome most owners actually want, and it is not the same thing as the highest number on a page. A business can be sold well or sold expensively, and those are not always the same transaction.

That sale is what turned an accounting firm into an M&A firm. The practice had spent decades telling owners what their businesses were worth; now it had watched one of them actually sell, and it knew what the difference looked like up close. George came across the table and into the firm. Jesse Hastings joined and pushed it deeper into brokerage. Santiago Flores came in to run sales and marketing. What has never changed is the makeup of the room: an owner who has been through an exit, and the CPA who prepared the numbers for it.

Why a CPA on staff changes the outcome

Most brokerages do not have one. They sell the business and hand the financials to someone else when a buyer starts asking hard questions. That is usually the moment a deal slows down, gets repriced, or dies.

Richard is in-house. He spent his career as an auditor, as Manager of Accounting at Overnite Transportation reporting into Union Pacific Railroad, and as CFO on corporate and bank boards. He has negotiated the sale of numerous companies, including five of his own. When a buyer’s quality-of-earnings team comes at your numbers, the person defending them has been signing books like yours for nearly three decades — and he does it before we ever take you to market, not after a buyer finds the problem.

We attack the business before a buyer does

Before we take a company to market, we red team it. We come at the business the way a buyer’s analyst and their quality-of-earnings team will, and we ask one question: what in here would make someone hesitate, or give them a reason to argue the price down?

Owner-dependence. Customer concentration. Margins that look too good to be true and will get challenged. Add-backs that cannot be documented. Contracts quietly expiring mid-deal. Licences held personally instead of by the company. Family members on payroll with no defined role. Books that have never been reconciled. These are not hypotheticals — they are the specific things we find, and each one is worth real money at closing.

Then we get ahead of them. Some are a document we go find. Some are a process that needs to exist before a buyer asks for it. Some take two or three quarters to fix, and in those cases the honest advice is often to wait, fix the story, and list into a better number rather than take the business out now and get repriced in diligence.

Every problem found before the market is a negotiating position. Every one found after is a discount. Deals rarely die because the business was bad. They die because something surfaced in week eight that nobody had prepared for.

What that means if you are the one selling

You are likely doing this once. We have done it for ourselves and for other owners, and we have been on your side of it — the part where you wonder whether your people will be alright, whether the buyer will keep the name, and whether the number is real or just the number someone needed to say to win your listing.

We will tell you what your business is worth, including when that is less than you hoped and what it would take to change it. We would rather lose the listing than put a number in front of you that a buyer’s accountant will take apart six weeks later.