We're a Colorado family office. Sometimes we buy the whole company. More often we're the capital behind whoever is going to run it.
Between us: a $500M+ commercial real estate portfolio, a dozen or so companies formed and financed, a Boulder car dealership we started from scratch in 2025 that hit nearly $4M in its first year, and a cabinet shop in Fort Collins that Jeremy bought at 27 and still runs.
Jake, Caitlin and JeremyYou'll deal with all three of us
Sometimes that means buying the whole thing. More often it means being the capital behind somebody else who's going to run it. Same balance sheet either way, and you're dealing directly with Jeremy, Jake and Caitlin from the first call through closing.
You found the business and you're the reason it'll work. We write an equity check, take a minority position, and let you run it. Running the business is the hard part. We'd like the capital to be the part you don't have to think about.
You've got the deal and the thesis, and you're assembling a stack. We're a reliable piece of it: a real check, committed quickly, from people who won't renegotiate at the eleventh hour.
The SBA loan gets the deal done and then it lives with you: a personal guarantee against your house, amortization that eats the cash flow, and a lender with a say in decisions that should be yours. Jeremy bought Summit with 90% debt and a personal guarantee, so we understand the stress of over-levering a small business.
You've built something that works, and you want liquidity plus some confidence that your people and customers land well afterward. We've run companies ourselves, and we have no intention of flipping yours in 5 years.
You've run the place for years, the owner is ready to retire, and the obvious answer is that you should own it. The obstacle is almost always the same: you don't have the capital, and you'd rather not put a second mortgage on your house to get it.
Plenty of situations are some blend of these. Tell us the shape of the problem and we'll tell you which one it's closest to.
And where we're probably not the best fit: if price is the number that matters most to you, a strategic buyer or a well-levered PE firm can often pay more than we will. That's a perfectly fair reason to go a different direction, and we'd rather say so now than after you've spent a month with us.
Cloud Peak is a new vehicle for work the three of us have been doing separately for about 20 years, most of it with our own money on the line. There's no associate in the middle here, you get all three of us.
We run an investing and development group together. Caitlin handles the numbers while Jake finds the deals, pursues ideas other folks think are crazy, and interfaces with the people.
Our own track record: dozens of house flips, hundreds of millions of dollars of genuinely complicated commercial real estate across office, industrial and multifamily, and a dozen or so companies formed and financed. We've invested as LPs in venture and real estate across California and the Mountain West. In 2025, along with two younger partners, we started Selten Automotive, a boutique dealership in Boulder that hit nearly $4M in first-year sales.
We find opportunities, fix problems, figure things out. That's kind of our deal.
LinkedIn →
I own Summit Cabinet Coatings. I bought it at 27 with 90% debt (technically an LBO, if you squint), a personal guarantee, and a dream. Closed the deal, went to a Taylor Swift concert that night, then cried at Outback Steakhouse on day one.
Two years later: $2M+ in revenue, a professional management team in place, and fewer emotional breakdowns. Turns out treating people well is actually profitable (a revolutionary concept).
Before Summit I spent years in commercial real estate, managed a $245M portfolio at Trailbreak Partners, and analyzed $33B+ in debt at Chatham Financial. I thought that made me ready to be an operator. Turns out I was mostly just good at spreadsheets, and the first year taught me the difference the hard way. I also run an Airbnb arbitrage portfolio on the side, which is a steady reminder that small businesses are mostly operations, not ideas.
The whole story on Acquiring Minds → LinkedIn →We're after durable cash flows, real infrastructure, and a team that shows up whether or not the founder does. We're happy with doubles.
Roughly $3-10M enterprise value for control deals. No upper limit on minority positions if the operator is right.
Control deals stay close to home: the Colorado Front Range, and the broader Mountain West for the right one. When we're a minority partner the map opens up, because the operator matters more than the drive time.
Home and commercial services, construction-adjacent, equipment rental, specialty distribution, light manufacturing.
If the owner disappeared tomorrow, something has to remain. W-2 teams, an internal successor or a GM, customer relationships that belong to the company.
Recurring or maintenance revenue is ideal, but repeat customers, long tenure and pricing power count just as much.
We'd love a big outcome at the end and we're not underwriting to one. The distributions along the way are what matter most, so we avoid structures that only pencil if the exit and the leverage both cooperate.
A business that owns its building. Both of us have spent careers in commercial real estate and we sometimes have exchange money that needs to go somewhere, so the real estate is often a feature rather than a problem.
One we'll argue about: in the trades, a W2 crew beats a subcontractor bench. It costs more per hour and plenty of operators disagree with us. Summit runs 13 full-time guys, and the quality and the retention are why the business is worth anything. If your model depends on 1099 labor, we're probably not the right fit.
Brokers: send us the deal anyway if you think we're wrong (we have been before). We'll get back to you quickly either way, and we'd rather give you a fast no than sit on it.
Why we can afford to leave a good business alone.
Most of the cost-cutting that happens after a sale comes down to debt service. Somebody levered the company up at close, the interest has to come from somewhere, and payroll is the biggest line on the page. We don't load a business up to the point where the debt starts making the decisions, and we can close without a financing contingency, so nothing about the capital structure forces our hand later.
There's no fund behind us and no investors waiting on a return by a particular year, so there's no date by which your numbers have to look a certain way.
The other half is that we don't arrive with opinions about work we haven't done. Our model is board-level oversight and a general manager who knows the trade, not the three of us rewriting a process that already works. If we thought a business needed to be run differently to be worth buying, we'd be buying the wrong business.
For what it's worth, the part we actually care about is that the people at these companies end up better off for our having shown up. There's no way to prove that in advance.
A call with one of us. You don't need an NDA to talk or a teaser deck to start. If it isn't a fit we'll say so right away.
3 years of financials and a look at the team. We come back with an indicative range and the structure we'd propose, including what we'd want you to hold onto.
We make the call ourselves, so there's nobody to wait on. Confidentiality holds the whole way through, and your team hears it from you on your timing.
No teaser, no NDA, no deck required to start. Tell us roughly what you've got and we'll tell you quickly whether we're the right people for it. Everything stays confidential, and we'll be straight with you either way.