About

Came home to keep
these businesses alive.

Silver Tsunami Partners is the succession-and-acquisition practice of Tim Naughton — Baltimore native (Gilman), Penn grad, and an operator whose career has been one long apprenticeship in making businesses transferable.

First business hire at a company that sold to Bankrate. First business hire at Jane Technologies, where a $10M valuation became $600M in under four years. Co-founder through a $600k raise. Founder of a marketing firm built for the hardest-margin industry in the country — and of the software that automates its playbooks. Multiple exits, every seat: marketing, sales, operations, finance, systems.

Now that experience points at home. Baltimore’s aging owners built real businesses — profitable, respected, woven into their blocks — and most of them will retire without a succession plan. The national statistics say the majority of listed small businesses never sell. We find that unacceptable, one business at a time.

How we work

• We show up. This is an in-person practice. We walk facilities, watch the software get used, and read the paper process — because the truth of a small business lives in the building, not the data room.
• Fixed scope, fixed price, no retainer creep. Every engagement ends. Programs are paid one phase at a time, each phase planned in writing and approved before work starts. You’re never more than a quarter in.
• One supported stack. We install a specific, documented set of systems and teach them thoroughly — not “whatever you already have, supported badly.”
• Honesty labels on the AI. We use AI leverage heavily in delivery — and label every capability proven, in testing, or not yet, based on what we’ve personally run in our own operation. We eat our own cooking first, and tell you what we learned.
• Both sides, in the open. We advise owners on becoming worth buying and buyers on buying well. Introductions between the two stay free, informal, and disclosed — trust is the entire asset.