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]

An established private equity fund came to us with a problem most funds will not say out loud.

They were good at winning auctions. That was the problem.

Almost every company they had ever bought came through an intermediated process. Banked, priced, crowded. Every deal meant outbidding a room full of buyers who all read the same book. And the stakes were going up. The fund was nearing the end of its vintage and roughly halfway through raising its next $1B fund. To support it, they needed proprietary deal flow, and they needed it fast.

Building that muscle in-house meant new headcount and a ramp-up period they did not have.

So we built it for them. We took their branded food and beverage mandate, built a targeted acquisition thesis, and went direct to owners of off-market companies at or above their $8M EBITDA threshold. Founders who had never been part of a banked process. No auction. No process letter. Just conversations.

Ninety days after engagement, they had a proprietary company with $9M of EBITDA under Letter of Intent.

One off-market relationship delivered what years of auctions could not.

Auctions tell you what a company costs when the whole market is in the room. A proprietary conversation tells you what a partnership is worth when nobody else is. Those are two different numbers, and the second one is almost always better.