My posts, measured.

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.

You’d struggle to find these sorts of companies on LinkedIn They run HGV maintenance depots, are independent, and > 10 years in business. They fix trucks. And don't update their company page. Databases are good at job titles and SIC codes. But no mechanic describes themselves as a "platform investment" or "sticky B2B service." Those are investor terms, not how these businesses talk. So how do you find a specific maintenance capability? There is no keyword for "4-bay workshop with in-house MOTs." We start with the map. Google Maps is the only place these businesses actually exist. It’s the raw source of truth. We scrape the location, then work backward. We match the pin to Companies House. UK Searchers get lucky here. In the US, private financials are a black box. Here, if the firm is of a certain size, we get the numbers and the ownership structure instantly. We know if it's a subsidiary or an independent target before we even log it. For US companies, it just involves a bit of extra agentic research. Then the AI looks for the clues in the noise. Does the website mention "contract maintenance"? Do the reviews mention "fleet support" It reads between the lines to find the signal. We are finding dozens of these "unlisted" targets. Companies that don't match the database keywords, but do match the economics. The best database isn't the one you pay a subscription for. It’s the one you build.