Why I Built HelmIQ

I spent time at Blue Wolf Capital and Kingfish Group before I ever thought about building software. I was doing the job: sourcing, outreach, tracking deals, prepping for calls. And the tools we were using were built for someone else's job, not ours: a generic sales CRM configured for SaaS deal stages, not the years-long relationship cycle an M&A mandate actually runs on.

I built HelmIQ because the tool I needed to do my own job did not exist. Everything below is why.

That is not a complaint about any one platform. It is the honest state of deal software for anyone not writing a bulge-bracket-sized check for it. The enterprise tools work, if you have a CRM administrator and a few quarters to implement them. The lightweight tools are cheap, and they are built for sales teams closing thirty-day contracts, not for a relationship with a business owner that might matter again in three years.

Starting Salt Creek Advisory

I decided to start my own firm, Salt Creek Advisory, with my brother. We do sell-side M&A for family and founder-owned businesses in the lower middle market. These are real companies with real owners, most of them selling a business once in their life, and they deserve the same quality of process a bulge-bracket client gets, without the bulge-bracket price tag on the advisory side.

Running that firm meant doing what every boutique shop does: a lot of calling. A lot of outreach. Building relationships with owners who are not thinking about selling yet, and staying in touch long enough that when they are ready, we are the first call. That is proprietary deal flow, and it does not happen by accident. It happens because someone tracked the relationship for months or years without losing the thread.

Where the Tools Ran Out

Here is what I actually experienced running deals day to day:

• Typing up notes by hand every night. I would come home after a full day of calls and meetings and spend the evening writing up what happened, because nothing was capturing it for me.
• A CRM that did not speak the language. It did not understand what a teaser was, what an LOI meant, or why a contact mattered even though we had not talked to them in eight months.
• Sourcing tools bolted on from the outside. A separate subscription, a separate login, disconnected from the CRM where the relationship actually needed to live once we found a target.
• "AI" that was really just a search bar. Every tool we looked at that claimed to fix this with AI turned out to be a chatbot bolted onto the same old data-entry workflow. None of it removed the actual burden.

It was built for a sales funnel, and we were not running a sales funnel. We were running relationships that might take years to turn into a deal.

Deciding to Build It Myself

At some point the frustration turned into a decision. I was already doing this work every day, so I understood exactly what was missing better than any outside vendor could. I did not want another point solution. I wanted one system where sourcing, relationship tracking, calling, and follow-up all lived together, with AI actually doing the busywork instead of just summarizing it after the fact.

That is HelmIQ. It is not a side project bolted onto an advisory practice. I use it every day to run Salt Creek Advisory's own deal flow, and I built it specifically for the workflow I could not find anywhere else: automatic relationship capture, deal stages that speak the actual language of M&A, and an AI agent that drafts the follow-up instead of leaving a blank page. The longer version of why is on our origin page.

Why This Matters Beyond My Own Firm

The lower middle market is underserved by software the same way it is sometimes underserved by capital. Boutique advisory firms and independent sponsors do not have a CRM administrator on staff. They do not have months to spend on implementation. They need something that works the way they already work, on day one, at a price that makes sense for a six-person team instead of a two-hundred-person one.

I built the tool I needed for my own job first. If it solves that same problem for another boutique bank, search fund, or independent sponsor, that is the whole point.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded HelmIQ? Jack Pitts founded HelmIQ. He spent time at Blue Wolf Capital and Kingfish Group before starting Salt Creek Advisory, a sell-side M&A firm for family and founder-owned businesses in the lower middle market, with his brother. He built HelmIQ because the CRM and deal-sourcing tools available to boutique firms did not fit how deal teams actually work.

Why did Jack Pitts build HelmIQ? Running Salt Creek Advisory's own deal flow meant heavy manual note-taking, a CRM that did not understand M&A vocabulary, and disconnected sourcing tools that required constant re-entry into the CRM. Existing options were either enterprise platforms with months-long implementations or lightweight sales tools not built for long relationship cycles. HelmIQ was built to fix that from inside the actual workflow.

Does HelmIQ's founder still use the product? Yes. Jack Pitts uses HelmIQ to run Salt Creek Advisory's own deal flow, which means the product is built and tested against real, daily deal work rather than a hypothetical customer.

What is Salt Creek Advisory? Salt Creek Advisory is a sell-side M&A advisory firm founded by Jack Pitts and his brother, focused on family and founder-owned businesses in the lower middle market.

How is HelmIQ different from other CRMs built by non-bankers? HelmIQ was built by someone running live deal flow, not by a software team building a generic vertical CRM from the outside. The deal stages, the AI-drafted follow-ups, and the sourcing workflow reflect what an actual boutique M&A firm needs day to day, not a guess at what bankers might want.

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