NarrowGate Group
We're building a generation of businesses worth inheriting.
Companies that are sale-ready, acquisition-ready, and leadership-ready at the same time. Run on systems that produce without consuming the people inside them. Led by owners who know exactly which road they're on and why they chose it.
Start the conversationThe mission
What we're here to do.
NarrowGate Group partners with owners of closely held businesses to build durable enterprise value, install operating systems that hold under pressure, and create companies that are worth working in.
Some of those owners sell. Some become the ones doing the acquiring. Some decide they'd rather keep building and never transact at all.
The road is theirs. The standard doesn't change.
Leave the business stronger, the leadership team more capable, and the owner's life more peaceful than we found them.
Who we are
Two operators, one firm.
20+
Years Brian has worked the lower middle market
NarrowGate Group is Robby D'Angelo and Brian Toelle.
Robby works inside companies as a fractional CEO. Leadership, people, culture, operations, and the unglamorous work of turning what the owner knows into something the company knows. Brian works the deal side. Valuation, structure, diligence, and the transaction itself, after more than 20 years in the lower middle market.
One of us builds the value. The other captures it. They're halves of the same job, and we put them in one firm so the argument about whether a business is ready happens between us.
Both backgrounds in fullThe name
Why Narrow Gate.
The wide gate in our work is the easy version of all of this. Sell to whoever shows up. Skip the systems. Take the number and move on.
We're named for the other one because it's the one that produces something worth handing to somebody else.
What we stand for
Five things we don't move on.
- Truth before comfort
You'll hear what you need to hear. Comfortable advice produces uncomfortable outcomes at the closing table, and by then it's expensive.
- The owner gets measured first
Before we score the company we score you, across the seven domains of the Peace Index, a diagnostic Robby developed: mental clarity, emotional regulation, physical energy, decision quality, relationship depth, spiritual alignment, strategic focus. Every number in a business passes through the owner's judgment before it becomes a decision.
- Peace is an operating state
Not calm, and nothing to do with wellness. A peaceful system produces consistent output without burning the people who run it. That's a performance standard, and it's the fastest way we know to reject a solution that looks excellent in a slide deck and produces friction every day once it's live.
- Inside before outside
The work inside the business has to be underway before the deal work can produce its full result.
- Legacy over transaction
We're judged by two things. The wire that hits your account, and what your life looks like six months later.
What we do
Four practices, in the order they usually matter.
These aren't four services on a menu. They're one sequence, and an owner can join it anywhere along its length.
Executive Services
The company learns to run without you in the room. Leadership, people, culture, and operations, installed as a system rather than held together by your attention.
NarrowGate AI
Usually we're already inside the business when we see it. A process that eats someone's whole week. A report three people rebuild by hand every month. We bring a team that builds the fix, not a vendor list.
NarrowGate Health
In our experience a workforce that can't reach care costs you in turnover, in absence, and in the quality of what walks out the door.
NarrowGate Consulting
Sell it well, or use it to buy others. Both destinations run on the same preparation, and almost none of it happens at the closing table.
Thrive without compromise