The BizNexus Partner Network is a curated group of M&A advisors, business brokers and intermediaries we work with across the lower middle market. Each partner is profiled here so the business owners and acquirers in our network know exactly who they are dealing with.
The firm
Apex Capital Advisors is an M&A and strategic advisory firm based in Markham, in the Toronto area, that works only with Canadian companies. It advises on sell-side and buy-side transactions and on raising capital, for companies with enterprise values of roughly $5 million to $75 million (Canadian dollars), most of them between $10 million and $40 million.
The firm works in three areas: technology, including software and hardware-plus-software businesses; tech-enabled business services; and advanced manufacturing and industrials. What sets the team apart is where its advisors come from. Every one of them has built and sold a company of their own, and each works on deals in the sector they actually ran. The principals run every engagement themselves; the work is not handed down to an analyst.
Meet Terry Mocherniak
Terry Mocherniak is the Founder and Managing Director of Apex Capital Advisors. He trained as a corporate lawyer at Osgoode Hall and spent five years practising, much of it on M&A work. He then spent about 25 years founding and running technology companies, mostly hardware and software in areas such as lighting controls and building automation.
Across that time he built three businesses and exited two. One of them sold twice: first to a private equity group, and three years later, the whole company sold to Siemens for six times what the sponsor had paid. He raised about $30 million in venture and private equity capital along the way, acquired companies himself, and has been directly involved in more than $400 million of M&A and financing transactions.
He has sat on almost every side of a deal: the founder selling, the buyer, the company raising money, and the lawyer papering it. He sold his first company with no advisor at all. Years later he hired one to sell another of his companies, and the engagement failed, so he sold that company himself. That experience is a large part of why Apex exists. When he looked at the Canadian lower mid-market, he found very few advisors who had ever run a technology company.
Terry is also an Advisor at MaRS, a director of and investor in two software companies, a past Executive Director of York Angels, and a board member of TechConnects, with which he produces the Getting Exit Ready conference for Canadian founders.
How Terry works with founders
Most of the founders Terry works with are selling for the first time, and many first speak with him three or four years before they are ready. He is comfortable with that. A check-in every six or twelve months and an honest opinion along the way is how most of his engagements begin.
His view is that a technology company is not sold on the financial statements alone. The numbers matter, but a buyer is also paying for the product, the team and the growth story, and an advisor who has never run a company tends to sell the business like a spreadsheet. Much of his work is packaging: explaining what the company is, why it will keep growing, and why a particular buyer should want it.
Who Terry works with
Founder-CEOs of Canadian technology, tech-enabled services and advanced manufacturing companies, typically with enterprise values between $5 million and $75 million. Many are in Toronto, and a good number are in Calgary and Montreal. Most are a few years from a transaction, weighing an approach from a private equity group, or deciding whether to sell, raise growth capital or buy a company to grow first.
