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]

Private equity has a playbook, and the first page is simple.

Buy the business. Find the operational gaps. Fill them.

Maybe the company has nobody selling full-time, so you put a dedicated salesperson on it. Maybe leads are dying in someone's inbox, so you stand up a functional CRM that tracks them and keeps them warm. Maybe nobody knows the company exists, so you build a marketing strategy that gets more potential customers talking about the business and thinking about it.

It works. It has worked for decades. Fill the gaps and the business grows. Every associate learns this in year one.

Here is what I find interesting. A lot of the funds running that playbook on their portfolio companies never run it on themselves.

Ask a fund how they source deals and you will often find the exact gaps they would never tolerate in a portfolio company. Nobody dedicated to origination full-time. No system keeping owner relationships warm. No strategy putting the fund in front of founders before a banker does. The deal flow function gets treated like a side effect of reputation instead of an operation..

Deal sourcing is an operational function like sales or marketing. The funds that treat it that way build proprietary pipelines. The funds that do not sit around waiting for the phone to ring, then wonder why every deal they see comes with an auction attached.