Ridgefield Partners is a middle-market M&A firm focused primarily on sell-side engagements, serving companies in the $1 to $25M EBITDA range. The firm has built deep expertise in the transportation sector, with eight team members bringing decades of combined industry experience. Ridgefield Partners is also expanding into new sectors like healthcare as it broadens its advisory capabilities.
While sell-side work remains the firm's foundation, the buy-side mix is growing steadily, a shift driven in part by the firm's investment in technology and data infrastructure.
Why the Old Sourcing Approach Couldn't Scale
Before adopting Grata, Ridgefield Partners relied on tools like ZoomInfo and HubSpot to build its contact database — a slow, manual process that yielded roughly 4,000 contacts over two years. When the team first trialed Grata, the gap became clear.
"We were unable to get anywhere close to Grata’s search functionality with how we’d previously been identifying companies,” said Michael Seeley, Founding Partner at Ridgefield. “The ability to drill down into nuanced, natural language type queries based on a company's website with Grata...that's when I said, let's spend some money on this."
From 4,000 to 70,000 Contacts in Months: Automating Sourcing with Grata's MCP
That conviction only deepened when Mike Moraski joined the team as Director of Technology Innovation. After evaluating Ridgefield’s tech stack, Mike began building the Ridgefield Engine, a centralized backend that connects Grata with other firm tools like Apollo, HubSpot, and HeyReach to automate company discovery, contact enrichment, and multi-channel outreach across email, phone, and LinkedIn.
"The ‘wow’ moment for me was when the MCP became available,” Mike said. “I knew the data was good inside of Grata, but I needed to get it out of the platform and into our engine. Now, Grata’s MCP connection allows us to do an initial search for these companies without using LLM credits. That’s been huge. We can dive into an industry or segment, perform a soft assessment, and then shape our groups, contacts, and companies for subsequent action. It’s a waterfall approach, and it starts with Grata."
The results were dramatic. “Once we started building automation and outbound with Grata, within 6 months we were at about 70,000 contacts. We went from 4,000 to 70,000," said Founding Partner Todd Harman. "Grata emerged as one of the linchpin pieces in our process."
Ridgefield’s database has grown to over 127,000 contacts and it’s climbing daily, limited only by credit management. “Grata’s coverage of the lower middle market and our target client base is exceptional,” Michael said.
Why Grata Wins in the Lower Middle Market
Ridgefield Partners' growth — from 4,000 contacts built manually over two years to 127,000 and climbing — is built on two things: data and trust.
"Grata really serves the lower middle market so well,” Mike said. “Grata is really strong with these smaller, mid-sized businesses that we're going after. Grata’s incredibly important because it gives us good data, and that's key because if we have bad data, it doesn't allow us to connect with the right people. It's a huge piece of our business and how we approach things going forward."
That data advantage is reinforced by a level of support the team hasn't found elsewhere. “I don’t know my rep for other tools. But I know my Grata rep,” Mike said. “It helps to have that personal touch because I know the team behind the platform. I can reach out to our rep Eric, give product feedback, and he can talk to his team, which has been a huge help. I can’t do that with other platforms.”
As Ridgefield expands into healthcare and other new sectors, Grata’s MCP is becoming the backbone of how the firm operates. “It's a huge piece of our business, how we approach things, and how we'll be using the Ridgefield Engine going forward,” Mike said.
