sponsored by DealGen Partners: 

A quick intro, for anyone new here.

I'm Joe Zanca, and I run DealGen Partners. We outsource business development for private equity firms, family offices, and qualified buyers. We work as a partner, not as a vendor. In plain terms, we become your deal origination engine.

The work speaks for itself. On average, our clients are under LOI within the first 90 to 120 days. And we stand behind it: we'll bring you 10 qualified deals within the first four months, or we work for free until we hit that number.

So if you're looking for a new platform company to buy, or one of your existing platforms is looking to grow through acquisition, let's talk. We'll get into the industry, do a little market mapping, and start putting together a qualified list of targets.

Reach out to me directly at [email protected]

Recently I sat down with more than 25 private equity funds in about 9 hours. ACG Boston. Two days, back to back meetings, one fund after another walking me through how they hunt.

What struck me wasn't how similar they were. It was how different.

Some funds are pure opportunists. They wait for the wind to blow a deal their way and react when it does. Others are machines. One group told me they're running campaigns with 20 origination firms at once, every one backed by a written thesis they'd researched to death.

Then there's what they do after they buy. Some hold for a decade and let a business compound. Others buy and immediately start bolting on more companies. One person calls that a growth strategy. The fund across the hall calls it clobbering things together.

Same game. Same lower middle market. Same 9 hours in the same hotel. Twenty-five completely different ways to play it.

There's no single right way to buy companies. But chance favors the prepared. The funds that felt sharpest weren't the ones waiting on luck. They'd already decided where they were going, so when the right deal shows up, they recognize it faster than everyone still hoping one floats by.

I get a smaller version of that conference every week. Working with a number of funds at the same time gives us a rare seat across the whole lower middle market. We see what's working, where the money is flowing, and which corners are still untouched and fragmented. The best of what we find turns into the research theses at the bottom of this note.