About NarrowGate Group, LLC
Robby D'Angelo and Brian Toelle.
One of us works inside companies. The other works on transactions. We put both in one firm because the sequence between them is where owners get hurt, and because somebody has to be accountable for how the pieces fit.
Here's who you'd be hiring.
The argument that saves you money
One builds the value. One captures it.
Robby drives the operational and human work that creates enterprise value. Brian drives the transaction expertise that captures it.
When there's a disagreement about whether the business is ready to go to market, it happens between us, before it costs you anything.
That's not a small thing. In our experience the most expensive argument in a transaction is the one nobody has until diligence is already running.
Inside operator
Robby D'Angelo
Before NarrowGate, Robby owned and ran five companies across five industries and more than twenty years, including a 20,000 square foot gym with 700 members. He carried the P&L, made payroll, and hired and fired the people running the floor. He still operates two of them alongside NarrowGate.
He has advised the business departments at the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and served on the board of the Mental Health Association.
He works as a fractional CEO inside a client's company, alongside the founder, the executive team, and the people running the floor. Leadership. Role and accountability architecture. Culture. Operating rhythm. The unglamorous documentation that turns what one person knows into something the company knows.
What he's building toward is peace, and he means something specific by it. Not calm, and nothing to do with wellness. Peace as an operating state: a business that produces consistent results without consuming the people running it. A leadership team that decides without checking with you first. A week that doesn't hinge on whether your phone has signal.
He built the NarrowGate Operating System as the method he uses to get there.
His job is the part that's uncomfortable to hear and expensive to ignore. Where the business depends on one person. Which roles nobody ever defined. Which cultural pattern is driving your turnover. He'll tell you, and then he'll stay and work on it with you.
And he's straight about what it costs you while it's happening. Changing how a company runs puts pressure on the people in it, and the ones with options are the ones who can leave. He'll tell you before the work starts which of your people he thinks are at risk, and the sequencing exists partly to protect them. If somebody good walks out during an engagement, that's a failure of the work, not a cost of it.
Deal side
Brian Toelle
Brian has spent more than 20 years in lower middle market transactions. He concentrates on businesses between $2 and $10 million in revenue and works outside that range when the situation calls for it.
That's the part of the market he chose. Companies large enough that the transaction genuinely matters, and small enough that they're a poor fit for how the institutional firms are built.
He wrote the methodology this firm's deal side runs on. The Business Valuation Playbook is his five-pillar, 21-driver, 126-point assessment of what a buyer would pay and why. The Shared Success Plan is his deal structure for financing a sale on revenue rather than bank debt. Both are documented, both have run on live transactions, and both are described on the Consulting page.
He is also the author of Grow Through Acquisitions: Mastering the Roll-Up Strategy and Why the Wealthy Love It, and teaches it as a twelve-week coaching program that puts owners on both sides of a deal, buyers and sellers, in the same room.
He's direct about owner financing, and it comes up more often than first-time sellers tend to plan for. His position is simple. If you're not willing to finance any part of it, it's fair for a buyer to ask why. Nobody knows the durability of that revenue better than the person who built it.
The firm
Four practices, one entity, one set of people accountable.
NarrowGate Group, LLC is the firm. Four practices run under it, and they're operating names of that single company rather than separate businesses.
- NarrowGate Consulting
Exit and platform transactions. Brian leads this work.
- NarrowGate Executive Services
Fractional CEO engagements and the operating system that outlasts them. Robby leads this work.
- NarrowGate Health
An employer wellness program that keeps your people healthy and your company stronger.
- NarrowGate AI
Documentation and operational systems built with AI, aimed at the same transferability problem the other three practices work on.
You can hire any one of them on its own. Most owners come in through one and stay in one.
The name, and how we choose work
Why Narrow Gate.
Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.
Matthew 7:13-14, ESV
The wide gate in our work is the easy version. Sell to the first buyer who shows up. Skip the diligence prep. Tell the owner what they want to hear and collect the fee. Take the engagement you're not right for.
The narrow one is harder, and here's what it costs us. We say no when the owner wants a document rather than a change. When the real problem is a disagreement between partners that no operating system will fix. When somebody wants to go to market on a timeline the business can't support. And when we're simply not the right firm, which happens and is worth saying out loud.
Taking the wrong engagement costs the client more than it pays us. That's the whole argument, and it's an economic one rather than a moral one.
27%
Why we built this
The handoff is coming whether the business is ready or not.
The Exit Planning Institute's Generational State of Owner Readiness found that over half of the baby boomer owners it surveyed plan to leave within five years. Of those same boomer respondents, 27 percent have completed a formal valuation, and 5 percent have a dedicated exit planning team.
That gap is the whole reason NarrowGate exists.
The other thing we watched happen is that the advice thins out right where the stakes get personal. You end up assembling your own bench. A CPA here. An attorney there. A broker somebody recommended. A benefits guy who calls every November. You do that assembly at the exact moment you have the least capacity for it, and nobody in that group is accountable for how the pieces fit together.
We built NarrowGate to be one group that covers the inside of the business and the outside of the transaction, and to stay accountable for both.
Source: Exit Planning Institute, Generational State of Owner Readiness. Percentages describe baby boomer respondents.
What we believe
Faith and excellence are partners.
We're Christians, and it shapes how we work. Businesses get built by people made in the image of God. Work is worth doing well. How you treat the people who helped you build something matters as much as what you get for it.
We won't preach at you and we don't require you to share any of it. We're telling you because you should know who you're hiring.
Close
You'll make this decision once.
Most owners do. Twenty or thirty years of work, and then one stretch of decisions that settles what it was all worth and what happens to the people who helped build it.
Our whole argument is that a decision like that deserves more help than it usually gets, and that the help should come from somebody who has to live with how it turns out.
Talk to us
Start the conversation.
Tell us what you're facing.
What happens next. Robby and Brian read these themselves. The first thing that happens is a conversation, not a proposal.
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