by: Simon Miller
Behind some of the biggest international entertainment deals of the past three years, you’ll find the name Rahul Patel.
A chartered accountant who learned the craft of mergers & acquisitions in London boardrooms, the 30-year-old financial advisor is now reshaping how independent media companies get bought and sold in Los Angeles.
Working with ACF Investment Bank, he specializes in cross-border M&A transactions — the complex, high-value process by which independent production companies, IP portfolios and media businesses are valued, marketed to buyers and ultimately sold.
Rahul says: “Every deal is a story about why this business is worth what it’s worth, and your job is to tell that story compellingly and accurately.”
The deals on his résumé would not look out of place on the transaction list of a major Wall Street bank. He led the sale of a majority stake in See-Saw Films — the Oscar-winning British-Australian production company behind Slow Horses, Lion and The King’s Speech — to Paris-based Mediawan, navigating a three-way negotiation across London, Sydney and Los Angeles while simultaneously executing a multi-GAAP accounting conversion and a complex New Zealand entity carve-out.
He advised on the sale of live events production company Done & Dusted to Endeavor — the entertainment and sports powerhouse behind WWE and UFC. He has built ten-r IP valuation models for the Napoleon Dynamite franchise, modelling scenarios across sequels, theme parks, Broadway and television. He has advised the founder of Marvel Studios on a new production venture, providing financial architecture for the fundraising strategy.
These are the work of someone who has spent nearly a decade developing a very specific, very rare kind of expertise.
Patel trained as a Chartered Accountant with EY in Birmingham, England, before joining PwC in London, where he rose to Senior Associate in the M&A practice, leading cross-border advisory on UK and US transactions. It was at PwC that he first understood the shape of his ambition — not audit, not tax, but the combustive moment when a business changes hands, and the financial intelligence required to make that happen cleanly, at the right price, for the right reasons.
“M&A is where you see everything at once,” he says. “The strategy, the valuation, the legal risk, the people. In entertainment, the variables are extraordinary – you’re valuing talent relationships, creative output, IP rights that might not generate revenue for five years. It requires a completely different muscle than conventional M&A.”
The move to Los Angeles in 2024, following a promotion at ACF Investment Bank, was the logical next step. The city, he argues, is the only place where the entertainment business truly operates at full scale – where the streamers, studios, private equity firms and independent producers all coexist in the same ecosystem, making deals over the same lunches, at the same conferences, along the same corridor of Wilshire Boulevard.
“London is a great market. Sydney is a great market. But Los Angeles is where the decisions get made. It’s where the money is. It’s where the buyers are. If you want to advise at the highest level in this space, you need to be here.”
His mentor, a senior dealmaker who first encouraged him to pursue international M&A over conventional accounting, gave him advice early in his career that he has carried with him ever since. “He told me that the best advisors are the ones who understand the business before they understand the numbers,” Patel recalls. “Any accountant can read a P&L. What clients pay for is someone who understands why those numbers look the way they do — and what that means for value.”
That philosophy is visible in the granularity of his work. For the See-Saw Films transaction, Patel did not simply build a valuation model — he built a show-by-show P&L that allowed prospective buyers to understand the performance of individual productions, the margin contribution of each title, and the sensitivity of the overall business to shifts in content output. The result was a process that attracted five competing offers and closed at a market-leading multiple.
“If a buyer can see exactly where the value lives, they’re more confident bidding high,” he says simply. “That’s what the modelling is for.”
Patel is currently working on a pipeline of transactions that span the US, UK and Latin America, with a particular focus on the booming Spanish-language content market and the continued appetite of US private equity firms for independent media assets. He has built a network that spans major studios, leading streaming platforms and top-tier private equity firms and sees Los Angeles as the perfect base.
LA has always been the creative capital of the global entertainment industry. Increasingly, it is becoming the financial one too. And as American private equity appetite for independent media content reaches an all-time high, this M&A specialist has positioned himself right at the center of the action.
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