The thesis, the target profile, and a live pipeline, most of it off-market.
Part of Find, the deal desk. Deal Flow is where the thesis is set and the pipeline is built: on-market, pre-market, and off-market, under your brand. A find is not an introduction. A find is a deal that can get done.
Step one
What you're buying and why, on paper, before you look at a single target.
Most owners start with a target and work backward to a rationale. That is how you end up owning something that does not fit.
The thesis comes first. What are you buying and why. What does the acquired company give you that you cannot build. Route density in a market you already serve. A crew you cannot hire. A customer list. A license. A piece of equipment that changes your cost position.
The thesis is written down because it disqualifies deals fast.
Most of the value of a written thesis is what it lets you say no to.
Step two
The specific profile the thesis produces. Tight beats broad.
From the thesis comes a specific profile. Revenue band, geography, customer mix, owner situation, what the business must have and what disqualifies it immediately.
Tight profiles produce better deal flow than broad ones. When we go to a broker with “a CPA firm with five associates in the Carolinas,” we get real names, often pre-market owners who are not listed anywhere. When we go with “professional services, somewhere in the Southeast,” we get their public inventory.
Step three
The best deals never reach the market. The pipeline is built to reach them first.
Three sources, in order of preference.
Brokers hold relationships with owners who are not ready to list. Those owners are pre-market: on a follow-up list somewhere, sometimes for years, not shopped and often not yet decided. When we bring a qualified, capitalized buyer with a specific mandate, that conversation changes. The broker gets a transaction that would not otherwise have happened, and you get a company bought off-market, before a competitive process could ever form.
Some buyers dismiss anything on the market as picked over. Picked over by whom. A deal that has been listed for six months is usually a structure problem, not a business problem, and it is the closest thing to an off-market deal that is still technically listed. Those are the ones where knowing how to structure a deal is worth the most.
When the first two do not produce, we commission outbound against your specific profile to reach pre-market owners directly. We do not build a cold-calling operation. There are firms whose entire business is running that engine, and we would rather pay one of them than add another voice to the twelve emails a week your targets already get.
The boundary
We do not maintain an inventory of businesses for sale. That is a seller's business, and we do not represent sellers.
