Capital
Invitation-Only AccessOff-market. Cash-flowing. Owner-led. Too small to bank, too private to market, and invisible to anyone who wasn't already in the room.
Smith & Maye is in the room — because we spend our days advising the owners, long before anyone is thinking about a transaction.
Found before they are listed
Relationships make the work visible.
Product Suite
Structured financing across the full capital stack — matched to the deal, underwritten to the operator.
Speed and optionality for operating businesses that need capital moving now.
Fast, flexible funding for day-to-day operations.
Required Documents
Loan amounts, terms, and qualification criteria are indicative and subject to change and final underwriting review. This document is a summary of available capabilities and does not constitute a commitment to lend. Contact your Smith & Maye Capital advisor to structure a specific transaction.
The Thesis
America's lower middle market is fragmented and aging. Hundreds of thousands of owner-operators — in home services, in auto repair, in trades that generate real cash and no press — are approaching an exit with no succession plan and no buyer they trust.
Institutional capital cannot reach them. The deals are too small to justify a banker. The owners will not answer a cold call from a fund. And nothing gets found on a screen, because none of it is listed.
Our advisory practice is not a marketing channel for this. It is the sourcing engine. By the time an asset reaches our capital partners, we have been inside the business — its financials, its operations, its owner's actual intentions — for months.
How We Underwrite
Current performance. Downside case. Nothing else.
We do not build a case on projected growth, projected synergies, or projected multiple expansion. We ask what the asset earns today, what it earns in a bad year, and what happens to the capital structure if we're wrong.
This is the same discipline we bring to the businesses we advise. It is the reason an owner trusts us to represent him, and the reason a partner trusts us to underwrite for him. One standard, pointed at two problems.
Diagnosis Runs Both Ways
We read our capital partners with the same rigor we read a business.
Fit is not a function of check size. It is a function of time horizon, of temperament in a drawdown, and of whether a partner wants to own operating businesses or merely wants to have owned them.
This is why relationships at Smith & Maye begin with an invitation. We reach out when we believe there is genuine alignment. Inquiries are welcome and are read carefully — but the invitation comes first, and it is extended only after we have done our own work.
An invitation follows the work.
Capital Inquiry
We are not raising from the public and we do not maintain a general solicitation. This form is a beginning, not an application.
Submitting this form does not create a client, advisory, or investor relationship. Nothing on this page is an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Smith & Maye, LLC is not a registered broker-dealer or investment adviser.
Smith & Maye Capital
We diagnose the position, then match the right instrument to the operator and the objective.
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