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]

We put together a list of fourteen verticals we would run a search in tomorrow. Fire and life safety. Standby power and generators. Commercial roofing. Data center and mission critical services. Precision machining.

Here is the thing about that list. Not one of them is a secret.

Sit down with the last five funds you talked to and you will hear at least three of the same names. Everybody likes code mandated demand, route density, contracts that renew whether or not the economy cooperates, an aging owner base, and a long tail of shops too small to show up in a banker's process. Everybody has drawn the same box around the same fragmented market.

Which makes the thesis the cheap part. A thesis costs a weekend and a sharp analyst.

The expensive part is the owners inside that box. The ones who have never taken a banker's call, who have no idea what the business is worth, who are not going to answer an email that opens with “I hope this finds you well.” The expensive part is being the name already in that owner's phone well before he decides he is done.

So we keep the list, because we are ready to run every search on it. We just do not confuse having the list with having the deals.

A crowded thesis is usually a correct thesis. That is why it is crowded. The edge was never in picking the vertical, it is in whether you can get to the owners inside it first, and whether they will take your call when you do. Platforms are not built on a point of view. They are built on access.