Adam Markley: How Evaluating Other People's Deals Built a Six-Company Holdco

The Setup Adam Markley's path into acquisitions didn't start with Walker Deibel's book or a Stanford search fund. He was a partner in an education venture that taught people how to buy businesses, with a heavy focus on the UK market where SBA lending isn't the default financing rail. The role put him in a seat most searchers would pay for: reviewing deal after deal on behalf of community members, pressure-testing assumptions, and watching what happened after close. That's the quiet edge behind PROX Capital Group. Before Markley bought anything for his own account, he had already touched hundreds of deals through other people's eyes. Pattern recognition compounded. Valuation instincts sharpened. He saw which structures held up when operators hit their first bad quarter and which ones cracked. The Deal (Deals) PROX is a holdco, not a single acquisition. The current portfolio is six companies: five acquired (fully or partially) and one built from scratch. F.W. Haxel is one of the named operating businesses in the group. Specific purchase prices and multiples aren't disclosed publicly, which is consistent with a privately financed holdco that isn't running an SBA-stamped deal book. The financing philosophy is the tell. Markley leans on seller financing and creative structures rather than the standard 10% down, SBA 7(a), personal guarantee playbook. Coming out of the UK market, where SBA simply doesn't exist, he learned early that a motivated seller's balance sheet is often the cheapest and most flexible source of capital in a small deal. That habit carried over. Operating Moves The structural choice that shapes everything at PROX is the operating partner model. Markley doesn't parachute in as CEO of every business he buys. Each company sits with an operator who has skin in the game and day-to-day authority. Markley's role is capital allocator, deal sourcer, and pattern-matcher across the portfolio. That approach lets a holdco scale past the physical limit of one person's calendar. It also changes what you underwrite for. Instead of asking 'can I run this?', the question becomes 'is there a person here, or findable, who can run this and wants to own a piece?' Deals where the answer is no get passed, even if the financials look clean. Operating Lessons - Reps before checks. Evaluating other people's deals for years is a cheaper way to build judgment than learning on your own balance sheet. If you can find a seat reviewing LOIs and diligence, take it before you buy. - Seller financing isn't a fallback. Treated as the primary tool, it forces alignment, lowers cash-at-close risk, and gives you a seller who still picks up the phone in month three. - Operating partners change what you can buy. A holdco with bench depth can acquire businesses that a solo searcher structurally can't touch, because the constraint isn't your time, it's theirs. - Geography of education matters. Learning deals in a market without SBA (the UK) produced a more structurally creative operator than one trained entirely inside the 10%-down 7(a) box....