Head of Corporate Development

🏆 Great Place to Work® Certified | USA

Harbor Compliance is a leading technology platform for entity compliance, helping more than 80,000 businesses and nonprofits manage licensing, tax registration, and legal entity requirements nationwide. Founded in 2012 and recognized repeatedly by the Inc. 5000 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500, we've grown through five strategic acquisitions — and are now backed by a 2026 majority growth investment from Bregal Sagemount to accelerate product, AI, and customer experience. We're a passionate team making compliance simpler and smarter for every organization we serve.

Harbor Compliance is seeking an entrepreneurial, commercially minded Head of Corporate Development to build and lead our M&A function from the ground up. As our first-ever dedicated corporate development hire, you will design the playbook, establish the pipeline, and drive a high-velocity roll-up strategy driving transactions each year in the lower middle market ($5M–$100M TEV).

Reporting directly to the CFO and maintaining high visibility with our Private Equity board, you will champion the end-to-end deal lifecycle—from proprietary sourcing and sophisticated underwriting to execution and integration handoff. Designed for a player-coach who thrives in a greenfield environment and possesses the long-term ambition to scale into a C-level equivalent executive.

Responsibilities

• Build the M&A Function: Establish Harbor’s inaugural corporate development infrastructure, playbooks, and processes from scratch with no prior internal precedent.
• Drive Proprietary Sourcing: Build and maintain a robust, proprietary deal pipeline through aggressive direct founder outreach, banker relationships, and industry networking; reliance on inbound flow is insufficient.
• Own End-to-End Execution: Independently manage the full deal lifecycle from NDA and LOI negotiation through diligence, data room management, legal counsel coordination, and closing conditions.
• Conduct Advanced Financial Underwriting: Build bespoke financial models and underwrite LMM software/services deals, evaluating normalized EBITDA, recurring revenue quality, and core SaaS metrics (ARR, GRR, NRR, and cohort churn).
• Sustain High Deal Velocity: Direct parallel workstreams across multiple live transactions simultaneously to achieve an aggressive target cadence of 3–5 closed deals per year.
• Lead Cross-Functional Alignment: Coordinate and drive accountability across internal Finance, Legal, RevOps, and Operations teams without direct authority to ensure seamless execution.
• Deliver Board-Level Reporting: Partner closely with the CFO to provide regular, highly visible updates to Private Equity sponsors regarding pipeline health, deal metrics, and strategic underwriting logic.
• Facilitate Integration Handoffs: Develop clean integration frameworks and process-oriented handoffs to ensure portfolio operators can successfully onboard acquisitions post-close.

Experience

• 6–10 Years of Relevant Experience: A foundational background in Investment Banking, followed by a minimum of 2 years in a PE investing or corporate development operator role.
• Proven LMM Track Record: Demonstrated experience underwriting and closing transactions specifically within the $5M–$100M Total Enterprise Value (TEV) range.
• Roll-Up Platform Exposure: Hands-on experience working within or for a high-velocity roll-up platform, demonstrating an understanding of rapid deal cadence and integration pacing.
• Sector Familiarity: Prior deal execution experience within tech-enabled business services, compliance workflow, legaltech, regtech, GRC, or vertical SaaS.
• Business Model Fluency: Practical exposure underwriting businesses with recurring-revenue, network-effect, or membership-based models.
• Greenfield Operator Mindset: Proven experience operating as an individual contributor in an environment requiring autonomy, pragmatism, and a roll-up-your-sleeves execution style.

Preferred Skills

• Advanced SaaS/Services Modeling: Elite financial model