We acquire boutique services firms — and give founders the room to stay & grow.
A different kind of holding company. We buy thoughtful, founder-led professional services firms, keep the brand, keep the founder, and provide the operating infrastructure that boutique shops outgrow before they can build it themselves.
The best services firms aren't broken. They're bottlenecked.
Boutique services firms — fifteen, thirty, fifty people — get stuck at a familiar ceiling. The founder is the rainmaker, the recruiter, the delivery lead, and the operator. Hiring senior people is hard. Building a sales engine is harder. Building the back office no one sees costs more than the next hire ever earns.
Most of these firms have two exits available: sell to a strategic that erases the brand, or keep grinding alone. We think there's a third option — sell into a shared operating platform, keep the firm, keep the founder, and let the business become what it was always supposed to be.
A hub & spoke, deliberately weighted toward the spokes.
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i.
Founders stay in the seat.
You run your firm. You set the strategy. You keep the equity that should have been yours to keep.
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ii.
Brands stay sharp.
No rebrand. No "a Forward Deployed Equity company" tag in your email signature. Your brand is a feature, not a casualty.
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iii.
Infrastructure travels underneath.
Finance, recruiting, contracts, delivery patterns, shared senior talent. Built once. Available to every firm in the portfolio.
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iv.
Capital with a long memory.
We're not a clock. We hold, we compound, we let firms become great. The exit, if there is one, is the founder's call.
You've built something real — and you've hit the ceiling of what one person can carry.
- Boutique professional services. Data, analytics, design, research, strategy, technical consulting — the work that lives or dies on craft.
- Roughly $1M–$15M in revenue, mostly project or retainer.
- A name that means something to the clients who say it.
- Margins that reward expertise, not headcount arbitrage.
- You still love the work. You don't love being the only adult in the room.
- You want to keep building — with leverage, not with a new boss.
- You've thought about selling. Nothing on the menu fits.
- You'd take a partner who'd genuinely make your firm better.
If any of that lands — even loosely — there's probably a conversation worth having. No deck, no NDA, no process. Just a call.
Start a conversationBuilt by an operator who lived the problem.
Forward Deployed Equity was founded by Alex Escoriaza. Alex runs Analytics CC, a data & analytics consultancy that delivers for PE-backed operating companies — the kind of work where the analytics function has to ship in weeks, not quarters, and where the founder is in the room when it matters.
Running Analytics CC made one thing obvious: the bottleneck on great boutique firms isn't the work, the market, or the talent. It's that every founder rebuilds the same operating layer from scratch — and most never get past it. FDE exists to be that layer, once, for a small set of firms that deserve to keep going.
— A.E. Founder, Forward Deployed Equity
If your firm is the one we're describing, we'd like to hear from you.
alex@forwarddeployedequity.comDirect, confidential, no process. We read every note.