Fractional Corporate Development
The thesis, the target profile, and a pipeline that keeps running.
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 a written thesis disqualifies deals fast. Most of the value of having one is in what it lets you say no to.
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. When we go with “professional services, somewhere in the Southeast,” we get their inventory.
Three sources, in order of preference.
Brokers hold relationships with owners who are not ready to list. Those owners are on a follow-up list somewhere, sometimes for years. 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. You get a company that never went to market.
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. 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. 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.
We do not maintain an inventory of businesses for sale. That is a seller's business, and we do not represent sellers.
