About the Company

Soltis Investment Advisors is a fee-only financial planning and investment firm based in St. George, Utah. The company provides a range of wealth management and financial services to individuals, families, and small businesses, including retirement and estate planning, investment analysis, risk management, and multi-generational wealth consulting. As a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA), Soltis manages about $13B of client assets, with $7B allocated to the wealth management side of their operations, and the remaining $6B sits on the institutional side (401(k)s, foundations, endowments, cash management reserves, etc.). Soltis is also an active acquirer and purchased GDM Private Financial Solutions in April of 2026. 

Challenges

For the past ten years, Soltis has experienced 25% AUM growth through strong organic growth. As their operations expanded, their clients began requesting additional financial services and areas of advisor expertise. To better meet their client’s needs, the firm began pursuing M&A as a strategic lever for providing additional value while also increasing its regional footprint. 

But M&A is complicated, and Jeff Harris, Soltis's Head of M&A and Partnerships, had seen how quickly it could go sideways. In his prior role, diligence lived in spreadsheets, deal documents were scattered across shared drives, and every department ran its own project management tool. M&A work was siloed by default, and the structure was chaotic.

When he arrived at Soltis, they were facing similar challenges. Stakeholders (sellers, outside counsel, internal partners) cycled through email threads with no system of record. Document versions multiplied. Diligence task status was often undocumented or lost in the shuffle. Drives and spreadsheets couldn't enforce the granular permissions Soltis needed to protect sensitive financial and HR data. 

The impact was most evident in the weekly executive meeting. When leadership asked which deals were where, the M&A team couldn't answer. Pipeline data was stale or missing entirely, leading to slower deals and missed critical findings. Untimely setbacks as they quickly leaned into their new M&A focus.

Negative Business Impacts

‍Fragmented communication: Stakeholders worked from separate spreadsheets and competing email threads, with no system of record. Updates went undocumented, decisions lost their context, and key information failed to reach the right parties.

Executive blindspots: When leadership asked which deals were where, the M&A team had no real-time answer. Status had to be reconstructed manually before every executive meeting and even then, the numbers were often stale.

No process-to-tool fit: Soltis ran every deal through four distinct phases (due diligence, legal, transitions, and integration), but no tool could model that structure. The playbook lived in the team's heads, not anywhere it could be enforced or improved.

Value left on the table: Slow handoffs among sellers, counsel, and internal teams delayed deals beyond their natural close dates. Synergies were realized late, and critical findings sometimes did not make it into the deal record.

“DealRoom provides playbooks and templates you can model yours after and adapt to your industry and internal processes.” -Jeff Harris, Head of M&A and Partnerships

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Solution

Before joining Soltis, Jeff had seen DealRoom in action and had been impressed by its capabilities. Streamlining transactions was one of his first priorities in the new role and he knew DealRoom could solve the pain points he had experienced in the past.

Jeff reached out to DealRoom and got Soltis onboarded quickly. Setup was fast and intuitive, and he immediately saw the potential for repeatable playbooks tailored to the firm's main acquisition types. His first deal at Soltis was completed the old way with spreadsheets, emails, and shared drives. The second ran through DealRoom, and the difference was night and day.

“Each deal you do, you're continuously going to get better.” -Jeff Harris, Head of M&A and Partnerships

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Why DealRoom?

‍Centralized Communication: Both internal users and external stakeholders can communicate seamlessly within the DealRoom platform. Any new comments or updates trigger automatic notifications to the relevant parties. 

Customizable Pipeline Stages: Soltis matched DealRoom's pipeline report to its four custom deal stages and tailored fields, tasks, and checklists to internal processes.

Robust Permissions: With DealRoom's security and admin controls, the team sets precise permissions, findings stay inaccessible to sellers, and non-HR employees can't view HR information.

Dynamic Timeline Management: Meeting time was used more effectively by setting dynamic dates for task completion. If the dates weren’t showing red, the issue wasn’t yet critical and didn’t require immediate discussion.

Outcomes

‍Repeatable Playbooks: Soltis is all-in on M&A as a growth lever, and with clear playbooks, setting up new deals is fast and easy, and team members know who is responsible for what and when. 

Robust Reporting: With custom pipeline reports and filtered views, weekly meetings with executives are now much more productive and informative. Soltis execs are also fully bought-in on M&A as a strategy and have increased trust in the team. 

A Single Source of Truth: With all transaction data centralized in DealRoom, critical information is easy to find, and communication happens entirely through a single platform. 

Increased Deal Velocity: With far less tool friction, fewer communication issues, and less task uncertainty, deals move much more quickly through Soltis’s pipeline, enabling them to pursue their M&A strategy as a growth driver. 

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