The firm

Wild Rose Advisors is an independent advisory firm for founder-owned companies, led by its principal from the first conversation to closing.

One side of the table

Wild Rose Advisors advises the owners of founder-owned companies on the sale of a company, the raising of capital and its value. It represents one side of a transaction, the owner's.

The firm puts strategic acquirers, private equity and private investors in competition for a company, and sets a full sale beside a minority investment, a majority recapitalization and a partnership, so that the owner chooses with every option priced.

Wild Rose Advisors is based in Houston, Texas, and advises owners wherever the company is located. Within a few hours of Houston, meetings take place at the owner's place of business.

Cole Kutschinski

Principal

Every engagement, from the first conversation to closing

Cole Kutschinski is Principal of Wild Rose Advisors, where he is responsible for every engagement.

Prior to Wild Rose, Cole spent seven years in senior leadership at Foundation Automotive, most recently as Senior Vice President. During that period the company acquired and integrated more than forty businesses across four states and Canada, and he was involved on the buy side of those acquisitions and, later, in the sale of several of the same businesses.

Cole founded ICOM AI, a software company serving automotive dealerships, which he grew to more than two hundred clients and led through its sale in 2024. He also founded a Houston trade finance business that structures and finances cross-border commodity transactions.

Cole was named to the Automotive News 40 Under 40 and the Auto Remarketing Dealers Under 40 in 2023.

Buyers pay for earnings that recur, a team that operates without the owner, and records a stranger can follow.

Experience

Both sides of a transaction

The principal's experience of these transactions is from the principal's seat rather than the advisory one: inside an acquirer while it bought and integrated businesses, across the table when several of those businesses were later sold, and as a founder through the sale of his own company.

From those years the firm knows what a diligence request list involves in practice, which items a buyer will contest and which it will concede, and how an acquirer arrives at the figure in its offer.

Why the experience applies

A franchised dealership and a collision center are owner-operated, family-held businesses. They carry regulatory obligations and recurring revenue, and are usually run by the person whose name is on the building. In that they have more in common with most founder-owned companies than their industry suggests: a buyer asks whether the earnings will last and whether the company runs without its founder, and the diligence questions and the working capital negotiation are the same.

How an engagement begins

Every engagement begins with a written assessment of the company: what it is likely worth to each kind of buyer, and what would change that figure. It is provided in confidence, at no cost and without any agreement. The supporting record for everything on this page is available on request.

Wild Rose Advisors welcomes conversations with the owners of founder-owned companies.