7 Best M&A Advisors in Jacksonville for $5M-$300M Deals (2026)

7 Best M&A Advisors in Jacksonville for $5M-$300M Deals (2026)

Quick answer: Jacksonville is Florida's financial-services/fintech, logistics/rail, and Navy capital — a different animal from Miami (the Latin-American gateway), Orlando (tourism), or Tampa (wealth management). FIS and Fidelity National Financial are headquartered on Riverside Avenue, Jacksonville-founded Black Knight was acquired by ICE for roughly $11.8B in 2023, CSX runs its Class I railroad from downtown, and the Mayport/NAS-Jacksonville Navy footprint supports more than 50,000 personnel — and Florida levies no state personal income tax. The local M&A-boutique bench is real but modest (about seven firms), so honest labeling matters more than firm count. The strongest locally-headquartered advisors are Heritage Capital Group (a 1977 mid-market bank and Oaklins member) and Harbor View Advisors (the on-thesis fintech/financial-services boutique), followed by The Inman Company and the Murphy, Quorum, and Southern brokerages, plus Florida-regional coverage from Capstone. The three distinctive local deal pipelines are fintech/financial-services (the FIS/FNF/Black Knight cluster), logistics/distribution (CSX and JAXPORT), and Navy-adjacent govcon (Mayport, NAS Jacksonville).

I'm Sean Yu, co-founder of Peony. I have built and watched 5,000+ data rooms across my career — about 1,000 of those when I was an investor at two funds with a combined $6.3 billion in AUM, and another 6,800+ since I started running Peony, where the founders we work with have raised over $18 billion to date. A meaningful slice of that work is lower-middle-market — services companies, distribution and logistics businesses, fintech-services shops, and healthcare-services roll-ups — and Jacksonville is one of the more distinctive and underrated markets in Florida.

Here is the honest read that most "best M&A advisors in Jacksonville" lists get wrong. Jacksonville has genuine corporate weight of a specific kind: it is one of Florida's densest financial-services and fintech headquarters clusters — FIS (Fidelity National Information Services), Fidelity National Financial (FNF), and GuideWell/Florida Blue are all headquartered here, Jacksonville-founded Black Knight was acquired by Intercontinental Exchange for roughly $11.8B in September 2023, and Dun & Bradstreet relocated its global HQ to the city. Layer on CSX Corporation's rail headquarters and JAXPORT on the logistics side, and the Mayport/NAS-Jacksonville Navy footprint on the defense side, and you have three distinctive deal engines. But the local M&A-boutique bench that matches that corporate weight is real but modest — roughly seven firms genuinely in the market, only a couple of which staff true mid-market sell-sides. That is not a knock on Jacksonville; it is a structural fact you should plan around, and it is why this guide labels each firm local versus Florida-regional honestly instead of padding the list with landing-page shells.

Because of that, the practical playbook in Jacksonville is to match the firm to your deal size and sector first, then decide local versus regional. For a sub-$10M business you usually hire a local brokerage or lower-middle-market shop with regional buyer relationships. At $25M-$100M you move to a local mid-market bank — Heritage Capital Group or Harbor View Advisors — and Heritage's membership in the global Oaklins network gives a Jacksonville seller cross-border buyer reach that a purely local firm cannot. This guide maps who is actually local, who is Florida-regional coverage (not a Jacksonville office), and how the three distinctive Jacksonville deal engines — fintech/financial-services, logistics, and Navy-adjacent govcon — should shape your choice. It sits alongside our companion guides for the rest of the state: Miami, Tampa, and Orlando.

What's the 2026 Jacksonville M&A backdrop, and why does it matter for advisor selection?

Jacksonville's M&A backdrop is defined by three distinctive corporate engines sitting on top of a real-but-modest local advisor bench. Understanding those engines is the single most important input into advisor selection, because they tell you which sector-fluent firm to lead with and when to reach beyond the metro.

Fintech and financial services is the standout cluster. FIS (Fidelity National Information Services) is a global fintech headquartered at 347 Riverside Avenue — its new riverfront HQ opened in September 2022 — with roughly 51,000 employees globally and a spot on the S&P 500. Fidelity National Financial (FNF), the largest US title-insurance group, is headquartered nearby at 601 Riverside Avenue and traces its roots to 1847. GuideWell/Florida Blue is a Jacksonville-headquartered mutual health-insurance holding company (No. 140 on the Fortune 500, roughly $32.9B in 2025 revenue) and the top Jacksonville-based company. The signal transaction was ICE's roughly $11.8B acquisition of Jacksonville-founded mortgage-technology firm Black Knight (about $76 per share), which closed September 5, 2023 and required an FTC-mandated divestiture of Optimal Blue and the Empower loan-origination system. Dun & Bradstreet relocated its global HQ to 5335 Gate Parkway around 2023 (roughly 500 jobs and a $75M investment). There are four Jacksonville companies on the 2026 Fortune 500. That HQ density seeds a pool of tech-savvy founders, strategic acquirers, and operators, and Harbor View Advisors' fintech practice is the clearest local echo of it.

Logistics, rail, and ports are the second engine. CSX Corporation — a Class I railroad with roughly 21,000 route-miles — is headquartered at 500 Water Street (it moved from Richmond in 2003) and is a Fortune 500 company. JAXPORT (the Jacksonville Port Authority), established in 1963, runs three terminals: Blount Island, Talleyrand, and Dames Point. JAXPORT is widely credited with roughly $31B in annual economic impact and about 138,500 Florida jobs, but those figures are secondary-sourced — treat them as widely-cited estimates rather than hard 2026 numbers.

The Navy footprint is the third. Naval Station Mayport (commissioned in 1942, described as the third-largest US fleet concentration), NAS Jacksonville, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay across the Georgia line, Camp Blanding, and the Marine Corps' Blount Island Command together support more than 50,000 personnel — a durable govcon and defense-services base.

One honesty note that shapes this whole guide: there is no reliable published Jacksonville-metro-specific M&A deal-volume or multiples dataset for 2024-2026. Anyone quoting you a precise "Jacksonville metro closed X deals at Y multiple" figure is likely inventing it. The verified large Jacksonville-linked transactions — ICE/Black Knight (roughly $11.8B, closed September 2023) and Aldi's acquisition of Southeastern Grocers/Winn-Dixie (completed March 7, 2024; the surviving company rebranded "The Winn-Dixie Company" in January 2026) — both sit far above the $5M-$300M band and are useful only as market color, evidence of strategic-buyer appetite in the region, not as comparables for a lower-middle-market process. A genuinely local, in-band example does exist: Heritage Capital Group advised AirPro Diagnostics on its sale to Rotunda Capital Partners, which closed February 24, 2025.

Which M&A advisors actually cover Jacksonville in 2026?

The Jacksonville bench splits into three honest lanes. Local mid-market investment banks are the firms to lead with for genuine middle-market work — Heritage Capital Group and Harbor View Advisors, plus the lower-middle-market boutique The Inman Company. Local Main-Street and lower-middle-market brokerages — Murphy Business Jacksonville, Quorum Business Advisors, and Southern Mergers & Acquisitions — fit the $5M end and owner-operator sales. Florida-regional coverage — Capstone Business Brokers, and optionally Sailfish Equity Advisors — reaches the Jacksonville market but is headquartered elsewhere in Florida, so treat these as regional coverage rather than Jacksonville-based shops.

A decision-logic preview before the firm profiles: at $5M-$25M, a local brokerage or lower-middle-market boutique with regional buyer relationships is usually right. At $25M-$100M, a local mid-market bank (Heritage Capital Group, Harbor View) — with Heritage adding cross-border reach through Oaklins — is the pattern. Above roughly $200M, or on cross-border deals, a national platform or a specialist leads, invited in rather than replaced by a single local advisor. Match the firm to your deal size and sector first; the local-versus-regional question follows from that.

1. Heritage Capital Group, Inc.

• HQ / office: 5210 Belfort Road, Suite 300, Jacksonville (Southside). The Belfort Road HQ is authoritative. (Secondary listings mention additional offices — variously "Jacksonville plus Savannah" or "Orlando plus Savannah" depending on the source — so I don't over-state a specific secondary-office footprint here.)
• Type: Mid-market investment bank — the strongest genuinely-local mid-market option. FINRA broker-dealer, CRD #44053.
• Founded / leadership: Founded 1977 by Don Wiggins. As of a January 2024 leadership transition: Don Wiggins is Chairman, Bill Sorenson is CEO, and Alex Kellison is President; Howard Serkin is now Advisory Board Chairman.
• Deal size: Roughly $10M-$200M enterprise value.
• Sector focus: Generalist middle-market across 12 verticals — aerospace/defense, building materials, B2B and B2C services, food and agriculture, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, metal distribution, real estate, supply chain, and technology/media/telecom.
• Why hire them: The clearest local fit for a Jacksonville middle-market process, and — as a member of Oaklins, the global mid-market network (roughly 850 professionals across 45 countries) — the local firm with the most credible cross-border buyer reach. Verified recent, in-band work: Heritage advised AirPro Diagnostics on its sale to Rotunda Capital Partners (closed February 24, 2025; bankers Howard Serkin and Bill Prescott), and advised Jemison Metals on its sale to SPS Companies (August 2026). That is a named, dated track record most local firms cannot point to.

2. Harbor View Advisors

• HQ / office: Neptune Beach, FL (Jacksonville's beaches); also New York and Boulder, CO.
• Type: Mid-market investment bank — the on-thesis fintech/financial-services specialist, the clearest local echo of Jacksonville's FIS/FNF/Black Knight cluster.
• Founded / leadership: Founded 2007 (investment-banking services from 2009) by Wall Street veterans. (Note: I could not verify a specific FIS/FNF-alumni lineage, so evaluate the firm on its practice and track record, not on a claimed pedigree.) Named a Top 50 Middle Market Investment Bank in 2025.
• Deal size: Middle-market.
• Sector focus: B2B Tech & Services; Financial Services & Technology (fintech) — the differentiating practice; and Industrials.
• Why hire them: The natural first call for a Jacksonville payments, insurtech, or financial-technology seller, because its dedicated fintech practice is directly aligned with the metro's densest headquarters cluster. Representative engagements include work involving NewBold Technologies/Spencer Technologies, Stratton & Co/Senior Market Sales, Rootstock Software/Ascent Solutions, Conquest Research/NeuroTrials, Belay/Fully Accountable, Opteon/Equity Valuation Partners, and James D. Hinson Electrical/GreenArrow Capital. Because those engagements are published without consistent dates, ask directly for named, dated closings in your sub-sector rather than relying on a specific claimed year.

3. The Inman Company

• HQ / office: 5011 Gate Parkway, Building 100, Suite 100, Jacksonville; also an Atlanta office.
• Type: Lower-middle-market boutique investment bank.
• Leadership: Principal William O. "Bill" Inman, who states roughly 50 years of experience. (An exact founding year is not published, so I don't assign one here.)
• Deal size / sector: Clients roughly $10M-$500M in revenue; industry-agnostic.
• Why hire them: A long-tenured, industry-agnostic Jacksonville boutique for lower-middle-market and mid-market sell-sides. Note that no dated public transactions are published for the firm, so screen it the way you would any boutique: ask directly about recent closed transactions in your size band and sector rather than inferring deal volume from tenure alone.

4. Murphy Business — Jacksonville

• HQ / office: 1301 Riverplace Boulevard, Suite 800, Jacksonville (Southbank).
• Type: Main-Street business brokerage with an M&A division.
• Leadership: Local owner/broker Andrew Thornock.
• Deal size / sector: The M&A division focuses on enterprise value $5M and above; generalist.
• Why hire them: A local, owner-operated brokerage with a dedicated M&A division that fits the bottom of the $5M-$300M band. For a sub-$10M owner-operator sale where local buyer relationships matter more than national reach, it is a natural fit; screen it as you would any brokerage by asking about recent closings in your sector.

5. Quorum Business Advisors, LLC

• HQ / office: 4600 Touchton Road East, Jacksonville (Deerwood/Southside).
• Type: Main-Street business brokerage / lower-middle-market M&A.
• Leadership: Founder Anthony (John) Rigney (30-plus years); a member of Business Brokers of Florida.
• Deal size / sector: Small and mid-sized businesses — sub-$5M into the low eight figures; generalist.
• Why hire them: A local brokerage well-suited to smaller Jacksonville business sales, with a founder who carries three decades in the market and a Business Brokers of Florida membership. Best for the sub-$5M to low-eight-figure range where a local, relationship-driven process fits.

6. Southern Mergers & Acquisitions, Inc. (Sunbelt affiliate)

• HQ / office: 255 S. Matanzas Boulevard, St. Augustine (roughly 40 minutes south of downtown Jacksonville).
• Type: Main-Street business brokerage; IBBA member and Sunbelt affiliate.
• Leadership / tenure: More than 30 years operating as a dominant Jacksonville-area and North-Florida brokerage.
• Deal size / sector: Main-Street to lower-middle-market — manufacturing, distribution, and service businesses.
• Why hire them: A long-established North-Florida brokerage with deep local tenure and the buyer reach of the Sunbelt network for smaller manufacturing, distribution, and service-business sales. The St. Augustine base is close enough to serve the Jacksonville metro directly.

7. Capstone Business Brokers, LLC — Florida-regional coverage, not Jacksonville-based

• HQ / office: St. Augustine (also a Largo / Tampa Bay presence). Covers Jacksonville as part of statewide Florida coverage — not a Jacksonville street address. Label it "Florida-regional, covers Jacksonville."
• Type: Main-Street business brokerage; Florida-licensed.
• Deal size / sector: Service businesses (pest control, HVAC, medical), plus manufacturing; Main-Street to lower-middle-market.
• Why hire them: A Florida-licensed brokerage that covers the whole state including Jacksonville, useful for service-business owners who want statewide buyer reach — but understand you are hiring Florida-regional coverage, not a Jacksonville-headquartered local office.

An eighth option, with caveats — Sailfish Equity Advisors: Sailfish is a Main-Street brokerage headquartered in West Palm Beach (established 1999, principals Rajiv and Sarah Khatri) that markets statewide Florida coverage. Its "Jacksonville office" is a service-area page, not a brick-and-mortar location, so treat it as Florida-regional/virtual coverage rather than a local Jacksonville advisor if you consider it at all.

A note on excluded "Jacksonville" firms. Several firms that surface in Jacksonville search results are not genuinely local and are excluded here on purpose: Parkland Capital Partners (a templated locations page with no local office), Transworld M&A Advisors (its Jacksonville page names no local office or advisor; a Finalis broker-dealer), Morgan & Westfield (a virtual / office-suite footprint), Cross Keys Capital (a real firm, but headquartered in Fort Lauderdale only, with no Jacksonville office), Fusion Capital (an SEC-registered investment adviser, CRD #154726, with nothing tying it to Jacksonville M&A), Acquire.Fund (no such firm surfaced), and "Businesses In Transition" (a generic phrase, not a firm). SEO landing pages that claim a Jacksonville address for an out-of-market firm are exactly the kind of padding this guide is written to counter.

How does Jacksonville's fintech cluster (FIS, FNF, Black Knight) shape the buyer pool?

Jacksonville's fintech and financial-services headquarters density gives a local seller a distinctive, tech-savvy buyer pool, and it is the single most differentiating feature of the market. FIS (Fidelity National Information Services) is a global fintech headquartered at 347 Riverside Avenue — its new riverfront HQ opened in September 2022 — with roughly 51,000 employees globally and an S&P 500 listing. Fidelity National Financial (FNF), the largest US title-insurance group, is headquartered at 601 Riverside Avenue and traces its roots to 1847. GuideWell/Florida Blue, a Jacksonville-headquartered mutual health-insurance holding company, is No. 140 on the Fortune 500 with roughly $32.9B in 2025 revenue. And the signal event that put Jacksonville fintech on the national map was Intercontinental Exchange's roughly $11.8B acquisition of Jacksonville-founded Black Knight (mortgage technology), which closed September 5, 2023 at about $76 per share and included an FTC-mandated divestiture of Optimal Blue and the Empower loan-origination system. Dun & Bradstreet has since relocated its global HQ to Gate Parkway. Four Jacksonville companies sit on the 2026 Fortune 500.

For advisor selection, that cluster changes your buyer pool in two concrete ways. First, it means fintech and insurtech strategic acquirers — and the executives, operators, and smaller acquisitive companies those large HQs have seeded across Northeast Florida — are unusually well represented in-region. Second, it rewards an advisor who can speak the language of payments, mortgage technology, title/insurance, and financial-data businesses. The clearest local fit is Harbor View Advisors, whose dedicated Financial Services & Technology practice is directly aligned with this cluster; Heritage Capital Group is the generalist mid-market alternative, and its technology/media/telecom vertical and Oaklins cross-border network add reach for a fintech seller with international buyers.

One honest boundary worth keeping visible: the marquee fintech transaction here — ICE/Black Knight at roughly $11.8B — sits far above the $5M-$300M band this guide covers. Treat it as evidence of strategic-buyer appetite in Jacksonville fintech, not as a comparable for a lower-middle-market process. On the document side, fintech diligence is exactly where per-recipient controls earn their keep: source code, security posture, and customer contracts should sit behind Peony NDA gates with dynamic watermarks on every page, so a competitive buyer list never turns into a leak.

How do CSX, JAXPORT, and the logistics engine shape Jacksonville M&A?

Logistics, rail, and distribution is Jacksonville's second distinctive pipeline, anchored by one of the strongest transportation-headquarters footprints in the Southeast. CSX Corporation — a Class I railroad with roughly 21,000 route-miles — is headquartered at 500 Water Street (it relocated its HQ from Richmond in 2003) and is a Fortune 500 company. JAXPORT (the Jacksonville Port Authority), established in 1963, operates three terminals: Blount Island, Talleyrand, and Dames Point. JAXPORT is frequently credited with roughly $31B in annual economic impact and about 138,500 Florida jobs — but those figures are secondary-sourced, so I present them as widely-cited estimates and would re-confirm them against a primary JAXPORT source before putting them in a CIM.

For a lower-middle-market trucking, 3PL, warehousing, cold-chain, freight-brokerage, or port-adjacent distribution seller in the $5M-$300M band, that engine shapes the buyer pool in two ways: strategic acquirers embedded in the rail-and-port supply chain, and private-equity platforms rolling up logistics and distribution services across the Southeast. The local advisor whose sector list lines up best here is Heritage Capital Group, which counts logistics, supply chain, distribution, and metal distribution among its 12 verticals; at the smaller end, the Main-Street brokerages (Murphy, Quorum, Southern) handle owner-operated distribution and service businesses. For a logistics business at the top of the band with a national or cross-border buyer pool, Heritage's Oaklins network is the natural way to widen the process beyond the metro.

How does the Navy presence (Mayport, NAS Jacksonville) shape defense and govcon deals?

The Navy footprint makes defense-services and government contracting (govcon) one of Jacksonville's three distinctive sell-side pipelines, and it demands a different advisor profile than a generalist local sale. Jacksonville's installations — Naval Station Mayport (commissioned in 1942 and described as the third-largest US fleet concentration), NAS Jacksonville, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay just across the Georgia line, Camp Blanding, and the Marine Corps' Blount Island Command — together support more than 50,000 personnel. That concentration anchors a specialized buyer pool: defense-focused strategics and government-services-focused private-equity platforms that diligence contract backlog and option years, security clearances and facility clearances (FCLs), CMMC and cybersecurity compliance, and the transferability of government contracts (novation).

The honest read on the local bench is that no Jacksonville boutique profiled here publishes a dedicated defense/govcon practice the way a Washington-area specialist would. Heritage Capital Group lists aerospace/defense among its 12 verticals, which makes it the most relevant local starting point, but for a cleared, contract-heavy, or ITAR/CFIUS-sensitive business you should expect to pair a local advisor with a national defense-M&A specialist and to run a separate clearance-and-novation diligence workstream. On the data-room side, defense diligence is exactly where per-recipient controls matter most: clearance-sensitive and contract-sensitive material is what you stage behind an NDA and release only to a short, vetted list, and Peony's dynamic watermarks stamp buyer identity onto every page so a leak is traceable, while NDA gates hold sensitive folders behind an executed agreement.

How is Jacksonville different from Miami, Tampa, and Orlando for M&A?

Jacksonville is a genuinely different market from Florida's other big metros, and getting that difference right is the fastest way to pick the right advisor. Miami is the Latin-American gateway — cross-border trade, real estate, and hospitality-heavy, with the deepest concentration of relocated hedge funds and private equity (Citadel and others) in the state. Tampa is an inbound-capital and wealth-management hub, home to the homegrown national bank Raymond James and a growing roster of relocated asset managers. Orlando is tourism, hospitality, and simulation/defense-training-driven. Jacksonville, by contrast, is Florida's financial-services/fintech, logistics/rail, and Navy capital: FIS and Fidelity National Financial on Riverside Avenue, CSX's rail headquarters and JAXPORT, and the Mayport/NAS-Jacksonville Navy footprint.

Practically, that means a Jacksonville seller's most natural strategic buyers — and the sector-fluent advisors who can reach them — cluster around fintech/financial-services, logistics/distribution, healthcare-services, and Navy-adjacent govcon, not the tourism, Latin-American-trade, or wealth-management themes that dominate elsewhere. The healthcare-services engine is worth naming: Baptist Health (the largest Northeast-Florida health system, with six hospitals and roughly 1,461 beds — a secondary-sourced figure to soften rather than state as hard fact), Mayo Clinic Jacksonville, and UF Health Jacksonville anchor a steady flow of healthcare-services and physician-practice M&A, which Heritage Capital Group's healthcare vertical is positioned to serve.

All four metros share Florida's no-state-income-tax advantage for sellers, so that is not a differentiator between them — it is a shared reason relocating owners and out-of-state buyers favor Florida exits generally. If your buyer pool is genuinely statewide or national, it is common to run a Florida-regional process across the metros; our companion guides for Miami, Tampa, and Orlando map the rest of the state.

What's a reasonable success fee for a Jacksonville M&A sell-side, and how do fees vary?

There is no Jacksonville-specific published fee table, so use standard-market ranges and adjust for the fact that the local bench spans mid-market banks and Main-Street brokerages. Lower-middle-market M&A advisors typically charge a monthly retainer plus a success fee earned at close, with a tail period of 12-24 months during which a sale to an introduced buyer still owes a fee. This is general information, not a quote — every engagement letter is negotiated.

The mechanics, from smallest deals up:

• Sub-$5M (business-brokerage territory): Many firms quote a Double-Lehman scale — 10% of the first $1M of value, 9% of the second, 8% of the third, and so on down to a floor. Effective blended rates near 8-10% are common at this size, and because a large share of Jacksonville's local bench is brokerage-led (Murphy, Quorum, Southern), a meaningful share of local engagements live here.
• ~$10M-$50M (lower-middle-market to middle-market): Blended rates fall as size rises. A Lehman-style structure at roughly $50M lands around 1.5%-2.5% blended, usually with a $50,000-$150,000 retainer credited against the success fee at close.
• $50M-$200M (mid-market bank territory): A process through Heritage Capital Group or Harbor View Advisors lands in the low-single-digit blended range, with a retainer credited at close and a defined minimum-fee floor.

Because Jacksonville's local firms concentrate at two ends — Main-Street brokerage and true mid-market — expect a $2M-$10M family-business sale to look more like the Double-Lehman world than the sub-2% mid-market world. For any Jacksonville advisor, get three things in writing before you sign: the retainer amount and whether it is credited at close, the exact success-fee schedule and any minimum-fee floor, and the length and terms of the tail. The full fee mechanics — Lehman versus Double-Lehman, retainer credits, minimum floors, and the engagement-letter clauses that inflate the bill — are in our M&A advisor fees guide.

What does Florida law mean for selling a Jacksonville business (taxes, licensing)?

Two Florida-specific rules materially affect a Jacksonville sale, and getting them wrong is expensive. This is general information, not legal or tax advice — confirm specifics with your Florida M&A counsel and CPA.

1. No state personal income tax. Florida has no state personal income tax, and that prohibition is locked into the Florida Constitution (Article VII, Section 5) — changing it would require a voter-approved amendment. So business-sale gains that flow to a personal return face no Florida state income tax. That is a real and frequently-cited part of the seller-proceeds story, and one reason relocating owners and out-of-state buyers favor Florida exits. It does not eliminate federal capital-gains tax, so model your after-tax proceeds with a CPA rather than assuming "no income tax" means no tax at all.

2. Licensing — no business-broker license, but real property triggers Chapter 475. Florida has no standalone "business broker" license, so most M&A intermediaries operate without a dedicated brokerage license. But Chapter 475 of the Florida Statutes defines "broker" broadly enough to cover selling business enterprises, business opportunities, or any real property for compensation — so when a business sale includes owned real property (a warehouse, a retail building, or land), a Florida real-estate license under Chapter 475 is generally required for the person representing a party on that real-property piece. Securities-based M&A instead runs under FINRA and broker-dealer rules — Heritage Capital Group, for example, is a FINRA broker-dealer (CRD #44053). That real-property carve-out catches many Jacksonville owner-operators whose enterprise value is partly in the building, so confirm real-property licensing coverage before you sign an engagement letter.

One thing not to conflate. Yacht and ship brokering is a separate Florida statute — Chapter 326, with a $25,000 bond requirement — and has nothing to do with business brokerage. Do not read a yacht-broker credential as business-M&A qualification, and do not assume a business-broker needs the Chapter 326 bond; they are distinct regimes.

Which Jacksonville advisor should I hire for a sub-$10M sell-side? What about $25M-$100M?

The right Jacksonville advisor is a function of deal size and sector, and the answer changes sharply across the bands. Here is the honest routing across the bench.

Sub-$10M sell-side — go local and brokerage-led. At this size the buyer pool is overwhelmingly regional PE and local strategics, so a Jacksonville firm with local relationships wins. Murphy Business Jacksonville runs a dedicated M&A division for deals of $5M and above (local owner/broker Andrew Thornock, on Riverplace Boulevard). Quorum Business Advisors (founder Anthony Rigney, 30-plus years, a Business Brokers of Florida member) handles small and mid-sized businesses from sub-$5M into the low eight figures. Southern Mergers & Acquisitions (a Sunbelt affiliate in St. Augustine, IBBA member, 30-plus years as a dominant North-Florida brokerage) covers Main-Street to lower-middle-market manufacturing, distribution, and service businesses. National platforms rarely make economic sense here — their retainers and minimums consume too much of a sub-$10M deal.

$25M-$100M sell-side — local mid-market bank, sector-matched. The field narrows to firms that genuinely staff middle-market processes. Heritage Capital Group is the strongest Jacksonville-headquartered option — roughly $10M-$200M enterprise value, 12 verticals, a FINRA broker-dealer, and — through its Oaklins membership — the local firm with the most credible cross-border buyer reach, plus a named, dated recent track record (AirPro Diagnostics to Rotunda Capital Partners, February 2025). Harbor View Advisors is the natural fit for a fintech or financial-services business, given its dedicated Financial Services & Technology practice and its Top 50 Middle Market Investment Bank recognition. The Inman Company can run industry-agnostic lower-middle-market processes for clients across a wide revenue range.

Above roughly $200M, or cross-border — national platform or specialist leads, often with a local co-advisor. At this size a national platform or a sector specialist leads the process, and the local firm — if involved — plays a supporting role. This is the clearest case where a modest local bench means the process is built to reach well beyond Jacksonville by design; Heritage's Oaklins network is one legitimate way a local seller accesses cross-border buyers without abandoning a local relationship. The through-line across all three bands: pick the firm for your deal size and sector first, then decide local versus regional.

Which data room is right for a Jacksonville M&A process?

Jacksonville sell-sides at $5M-$300M need the same core data-room capabilities regardless of sector: multi-party permissioning for 10-40 buyer parties, NDA gating with executed-NDA verification, dynamic watermarking for sensitive contracts and IP (especially fintech source code and Navy-adjacent govcon documents), and page-level analytics so the advisor can see which buyers genuinely engaged before selecting an LOI. The framing sentence for Jacksonville specifically: most local deals are sub-$100M fintech-services, logistics, healthcare-services, and Navy-adjacent exits, so the right tool is usually a flat-rate room, with enterprise VDRs reserved for the largest or most cross-border deals.

The honest landscape:

We make Peony, so this is honest disclosure: for $200M-plus deals or cross-border processes — the kind of multi-jurisdiction, export-controlled deals that the largest fintech or defense sellers run — most counsel will recommend Datasite or Intralinks for depth of historical workflow integration and information-rights controls. For everything below that threshold — which includes most Jacksonville lower-middle-market fintech-services, logistics, healthcare-services, and Navy-adjacent exits — the flat-rate options (Peony, Firmex, Ansarada) typically deliver equivalent functionality at substantially lower transaction cost. Peony Business at $30 per admin per month covers smaller processes, there is a permanent free tier to start, and more than 6,800+ founders use Peony today. The key feature to test on any vendor: can your sell-side advisor demo dynamic watermarks and page-level analytics inside a buyer-party sub-room without the buyer seeing the advisor view?

For a deeper teardown, see our virtual data room pricing guide.

Related resources

• M&A advisor vs business broker vs investment bank — the decision that comes before this Jacksonville shortlist: which of the three intermediary types should sell your company, by deal size, goal, and the licensing line that separates them
• M&A advisor fees: what you actually pay — the fee hub for this series: Lehman vs Double-Lehman math, retainer credits, minimum-fee floors, and the engagement-letter clauses that inflate the bill
• Best M&A Advisors in Miami — the Latin-American gateway metro, the natural node for a Jacksonville seller with cross-border or South-Florida buyers
• Best M&A Advisors in Tampa — the inbound-capital and wealth-management hub, home to the homegrown national bank Raymond James
• Best M&A Advisors in Orlando — the tourism, hospitality, and simulation-and-training metro, a core node in a Florida-regional process
• M&A Due Diligence Process Guide — the process map across all diligence layers
• Sell-Side Due Diligence — vendor due diligence for Jacksonville sellers preparing for a process
• Virtual Data Room Pricing Guide — the full vendor landscape
• Best data room for small M&A — VDR selection for sub-$30M sell-sides, the band that covers most Jacksonville lower-middle-market services and family-business exits