Calder Capital is proud to announce that one one of our own, Matt Baas, is the winner of the 2020 MiBiz Dealmaker of the Year Rising Star Award!
MiBiz recognizes three Dealmakers of the Year, with categories designed to honor individual corporate executives, company advisers, and investors. The individual awards aim to highlight a person’s body of transactional work during the awards timeframe.
Matt Baas, Co-Founder of Small Business Deal Advisors, LLC, joined Calder Capital as an intern in 2016 as a rising junior at Michigan State University. During the internship, Matt was introduced to many aspects of the small business M&A market and his intelligence, intense work ethic, and drive immediately stood out. If you met Matt, you would observe quickly that he is patient, analytical, driven and wise beyond his years.
“It is not often in life that you meet people with the combination of intelligence, enthusiasm, creativity and even-handedness, and that have accomplished as much as Matt has by age 24,” raved Max Friar. “And I should mention that he is a family man at heart, always making time for his wife, Kaitlyn, and their dog, Stanley.”
Nearing the close of Matt’s initial Calder Capital Summer Internship, Calder Managing Partner Max Friar proposed to him the idea of creating a brand that would cater to traditionally underserved small businesses, those that are either passed over by other firms or cannot afford high fees.
At that time, Calder Capital was passing on smaller many prospect leads – retail shops, restaurants, franchise resales, etc. – due to perceived opportunity costs. However, Matt himself had been an integral part of streamlining Calder’s CRM, developing significant automations in the firm’s marketing and administrative processes, all of which would make it possible to serve this market segment.
Max promised Matt that if he led the creation and operations of this new entity, Calder would feed the sales prospects and the two would become business partners in it. Matt immediately accepted the challenge and Small Business Deal Advisors, LLC (SBDA) was born. And he particularly liked that the two partners would be able to offer a robust M&A service to owners who otherwise did have many great choices in their goal of a transition.
Since SBDA’s first closing in October 2017, its growth has vastly exceeded initial expectations, cresting 40 total closed transactions since inception. In 2020 alone, SBDA closed 19 transactions, most of them very small local Western Michigan companies and many of whom had been passed over by other firms due to their size.
In addition to spearheading Small Business Deal Advisors, Matt also manages to make time to lead larger transactions at Calder. In January 2020, Matt managed the successful closing of Topps Safety Apparel in Rochester, IN.
We are honored to have this Rising Star on our Calder team, and we look forward to seeing what he does in the future. Congratulations, Matt Baas!