My posts, measured.

Blackstone just paid 18.5x for a bunch of plumbing and HVAC shops. If you're hunting trades deals, that number should worry you. Not because you're competing with Blackstone. You're not. It's worse than that. $2.5 billion for Champions Group in February. Goldman, $1.7B for Sila Services a few months before. The mega-funds aren't buying trades businesses anymore. They're buying the roll-ups. The platforms bought independent shops at 4-8x over the last five years. Blackstone just validated the exit at 18.5x. No wonder add-on activity in HVAC is up 88% year over year. PE and strategics now do roughly 80% of all HVAC deals. So I went looking for a real answer on how closed the window actually is. I screened 1,013 home services companies across Columbus and Cincinnati. Ownership, reviews, traffic, owner identification. Audit trail on every call. Two things the databases won't tell you: → The platforms already own the biggest footprints. The four PE-platform operators in my demo sample include the largest players in these metros. Columbus Worthington Air (6,824 reviews) is ARS, which is GI Partners. Service Experts is Brookfield. Erie Home is Gridiron. Bassett is Alpine. That's who you're actually bidding against. Not Blackstone. The platforms Blackstone just handed an exit valuation to. And they're working from better maps than you are. → But 19 of the top 25 operators are still independent. Family shops with 200 to 4,431 reviews, 30+ year histories, named owners. One is on its 4th generation. Several have succession signals hiding in plain sight. The window isn't closed. It's closing in a specific, mappable order. One more thing the screen caught: a PitchBook "PE-backed" tag that fell apart when we checked the actual evidence. Independent, owner named. That's the difference between a database and a screen. The demo is live and clickable. Link in comments. Want the full Ohio inventory? Comment "Trades" or DM me. Free. Whose maps are you working from? P.S. Different vertical? Same machinery points anywhere. DM me your market and I'll show you what it looks like aimed at your targets.

Most acquirers pay $25k+ a year for a deal database. And it's worst at the exact companies they most want to buy — the small, founder-owned, off-grid ones that never make it into a firmographic feed. You don't need it. You can build a better, proprietary screen yourself — all you need is Claude Code. I've spent the last 9 months building exactly this for 15 private equity clients. So I wrote the whole playbook down and put it online, free: → Where the real data actually lives — Google Maps for trades, the NPI registry for healthcare, Companies House for the UK. All free. → The cheap tools that do the work — Apify, Firecrawl, Claude Code. → How to scrape, enrich and score targets without it hallucinating (the accuracy discipline is the whole game). → A downloadable starter kit — the rules, prompts and playbooks. Just point Claude Code at it. Two live examples on the page: a home-services screen for Ohio, a dental screen for Texas. Every company scored, private-equity ownership flagged, the owner identified — with a full audit trail. No black box. Cost? ~$50–300 in API calls. Versus $25,000 a year. And it surfaces the owner-run targets the databases miss completely. 2-minute walkthrough + the full guide 👇 (free - no sign-up) screen.searchloop.ai — P.S. Prefer it done for you — built, with the outreach run (usually 20%+ reply rates)? That's what I do for funds. DM me. #privateequity #growthequity #searchfunds #dealorigination #manda

35,000 companies scraped. Under 100 worth contacting. 20% reply rate. One touch. The full sequence hasn't even started. A UK fund running a platform bolt-on strategy came to me with a problem they knew was important but not yet urgent. Both partners were buried in portco integration — hiring, operations, the real work of running businesses. Origination sat on the back burner. Nobody was doing it. Everyone knew it mattered. There wasn’t enough bandwidth. So they asked me to help. We pulled 25,000+ companies from Google Maps across their target sectors. Then filtered. Hard. Not just size and location. The client needed us to understand the business model — several specific things that mattered for whether a bolt-on would actually integrate. Including business model and whether the revenue mix matched the platform. If the fit wasn't right, it was out. After that analysis: fewer than 100 companies cleared the bar. 25,000 in. Under 100 out. Then the real work started. We set up dedicated sending infrastructure: private IPs via emailBison, proper warm-up, domain reputation dialed in so nothing bounces. The copy was specific to each business. Non-needy. No fund size in the first paragraph. Just the reason this owner, this company, matters. We launched last week with the first touch. Reply rate: above 20% including 3 owners you just called back directly. Not open rate. Reply rate. Most PE cold outreach lands between 2% and 5%. We're at 4-10x that. And the full sequence is still coming — LinkedIn touches, WhatsApp, letters, all of it. This is just the opening move. Most funds think the problem is one thing. It isn't. It's the whole system. The filter finds the targets. The infrastructure ensures delivery. The copy gets the reply. You need all three. Most funds have none of them dialed in. The partner who was too busy to source? Calls on his calendar now. Get in touch if you want the full breakdown.

7 years at Credit Suisse, Greenhill, and Treis taught me one thing about PE that doesn't show up in the pitch deck: The firms that win the next decade aren't the ones with the best capital. They'll be the ones with the best origination engines. A year ago I set out to build that engine. 9 months in: → 12 paying clients — 6 running platform theses, 6 running roll-ups — across home services, dental, healthcare, HVAC, and B2B services & software → 700+ owner conversations → 2 proprietary databases shipping soon — one this Thursday Going solo against an industry of 100-person firms taught me something: you don't need to be bigger. You just need to be faster - and keep the human in the loop. If you're in PE or are an advisor building a thesis in a fragmented vertical — the two DBs dropping over the next two weeks are for you. This Thursday: every specialty trades operator in Ohio, scored on 7 acquirability signals. Next Thursday: every acquirable dental practice in Texas, ranked by succession risk. Want the DB early? Comment Trades or Teeth below — or DM me directly.