Mike Ehrle Counted 281 Phone Calls. Then He Built a Company Around What They Were Really Asking.
He kept a list. Every time a private equity firm called during his three years as CEO of Click Boarding, Mike Ehrle made a note on his Remarkable notepad. By the time he left, the count stood at 281.
The calls were not about Click Boarding specifically. They were the same call, made by thousands of firms circling the same problem: too much capital, too few viable small business targets that were actually ready to do a deal. Ehrle realized the calls were not unique to him or to HR tech. They were systemic. And nobody had built anything to solve it.
That realization became Finparency.
Ehrle brings more than 20 years to this problem, most of them spent deep inside the machinery of the benefits and HR technology industry. He held senior roles at UnitedHealth Group, Aon, Davis Vision, where he led efforts that resulted in $600 million in client retention across 19 million members, and Hodges-Mace, where he expanded a sales team from 14 to 35 people and generated roughly $40 million in new revenue. He ran Click Boarding for three years. He holds an MBA from the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
What he took from all of it was a sharp understanding of where small businesses break down, and why so many of them never make it to the other side of a capital event. The preparation gap is the problem. Owners build real companies, generate real revenue, create real jobs, and then find themselves completely unprepared for the moment an investor sits across the table from them.
Finparency is designed to close that gap before the meeting happens. The platform runs prospective business owners through an assessment across 127 data points, identifies the specific areas that need strengthening, and works with them through a guided preparation process before making any introductions. On the other side, investors and acquirers see only businesses that have already been vetted and assessed. According to Ehrle, there are 4,500 private equity groups in the United States, 4,000 family offices, and 600 investment banking firms before accounting for strategic buyers, lawyers, and the broader deal ecosystem. The capital is there. The structured pathway has not been.
The thread connecting Ehrle’s background in employee benefits to his work at Finparency is less obvious on the surface, but it holds. Benefits spending is typically a company’s second largest operational expense after payroll. For years, it was treated as an HR matter, evaluated on compliance and satisfaction rather than on financial strategy. Ehrle has argued that this framing is exactly backwards. A company that treats its benefits structure as a financial lever rather than a cost center is a fundamentally different business to an investor than one that does not. Cost discipline signals operational maturity. Operational maturity moves the needle on valuation.
That insight is baked into how Finparency thinks about readiness. The platform is not looking for businesses that are simply willing to sell or partner. It is looking for businesses that have done the internal work to know what they are worth and why. That distinction, Ehrle has noted, is where most small business owners are left without support. He structures his own leadership accordingly, deliberately building teams that can move without waiting for him, a discipline he considers essential for any business serious about scalability and, by extension, investor appeal.
The market he is targeting is enormous and largely unaddressed. Traditional private equity has historically chased larger deals, leaving small businesses on the outside of a capital ecosystem that generates billions in activity every year. As profiled by TechBullion, Finparency’s marketplace model creates a structured pathway for small business owners to connect with investors who understand their specific value proposition, rather than being passed over for larger, cleaner targets.
Ehrle’s customer is often the owner in their mid-sixties who built something from the ground up and wants a path forward that does not end in a shutdown. That is not an edge case. Across the country, it is one of the most common stories in American small business, and one of the least served.
Finparency is betting that the infrastructure to change is worth building. Based on what Mike Ehrle has spent the last two decades learning about where the money goes and who gets left out, it is a bet he appears well-positioned to make.
About Finparency: Finparency connects small business owners with private equity firms, family offices, and strategic buyers through an AI-powered readiness platform and curated matching process. Learn more at finparency.ai.
