Retained search
Add-on origination for a private equity firm
An established private equity firm acquiring founder-owned add-ons for its home-services and consumer platforms
- Owners contacted a month, at full capacity3,000Fifteen warmed sending addresses and two LinkedIn seats, five business days a week
- Owner conversations a month, at that pace55At this mandate’s rate, about one owner in fifty-five contacted takes a call with the deal team
- Letters of intent, first two months3
- Add-on categories worked at once9
Mandate
The brief, in one table
- Client
- An established private equity firm acquiring founder-owned add-ons for its home-services and consumer platforms
- Sectors
- Residential roofing, garage door service, collision repair, pet care, portable sanitation and five more
- Engagement
- Retained search
- Figures as of
- September 2026
Before
The firm’s business-development lead had spent a year on LinkedIn: six to eight hundred messages, twenty to twenty-five real conversations, four or five live possibilities. Three quarters of the replies said the same thing: we love what you are describing, but we are not big enough yet. Almost none of the outreach was aimed at the categories the platforms actually wanted.
The mandate
Ten add-on categories with revenue and EBITDA floors, from residential roofing and garage door service to pet care and portable sanitation. Founder- or family-owned only, above the floor, not already owned by a sponsor or a strategic. One approved message in the buyer’s words. Human review before anything went out.
What we did
We built the owner universe for each category, scored every company against the floors, found the owner, and ran email and LinkedIn in parallel from dedicated sending domains. The deal team received a contact export every week, category by category: contacted, replied, interested.
Interested owners received a booking link and an introduction call that we set up and attended with the buyer. Passes were recorded with the reason, so the next category started sharper.
The result
At full capacity the engine contacts 3,000 owners a month across the categories, every one at or above the revenue and EBITDA floors. At this mandate’s response rate that is about 55 owner conversations a month for the deal team, each introduced with the research attached.
The first weeks ran at a fifth of that pace while the buyer reviewed every message before it went out. The deal team still held its first owner conversations within three weeks of launch and signed three letters of intent in the first two months. The buyer’s stated target for the programme is four to five closed add-ons a year.
Next case study
Accounting roll-up for a family office
The whole United States market of accounting and tax practices built from public records on the client’s own cloud, every firm researched and scored against the criteria, and outreach to the fits run from inside their CRM.
Next step
Bring the thesis. We bring the owners.
Thirty minutes with the managing partner on your criteria, the markets we would work, and what the first conversations look like.
