Some Banks Go as Low as $500K. Check Which Ones.
A Collective 54 member who runs sell-side M&A for a living told the room something most founders have backwards.
October 16, 2026
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1 min read
The question is not whether an investment bank will represent a firm your size. Below the line you are picturing, plenty of them will. The question is which ones.
He was agreeing with a blunt characterisation of the small end of the market, where the gap between what an advisor promises and what they can deliver is at its widest.
Why it matters to you.
Most founders treat their own size as the constraint and assume the work is getting a bank to say yes. So when one says yes, it reads as validation, and the diligence stops there. That is the wrong way round. At $500,000 to $1 million of EBITDA you are not choosing between representation and none. You are choosing among a group whose quality varies more than anywhere else in the market, and the ones most willing to take you are not reliably the ones who will get you the most. A bank that is wrong at your size costs you more than waiting would have. The limit on this: it is one member’s read from the sell side, and floors move with the cycle. A banker who is a poor fit for a firm at $700,000 of EBITDA may be exactly right at $3 million. The point is not that small-deal banks are bad. It is that at the bottom of the market the spread is wide and the pitch does not tell you where in it you are standing.
“It can be a ragtag kind of group when you go so low down market that maybe you end up short-changing yourself. And contrary to a lot of people’s beliefs, I’ve seen some investment banks go as low as $500,000, a million dollars in EBITDA. Everyone’s floor is different. - A Collective 54 member, sell-side M&A”
Your one thing.
Ask any advisor courting you to name the three most recent deals they closed at your size, and who bought. A genuine specialist answers in a sentence. Anyone who has to go and look is telling you something.
Collective 54 is where boutique service firm founders go to make more money, scale with less friction, and build a firm worth buying.
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