A real search runs one thesis against the whole market: the brokered deals every prepared buyer can see, and the quiet owners no listing can show you. We build both sides into one pipeline, verified by hand, so nothing that fits your buy box gets past you.
Our team runs your search, week after week. Your Five Experts Command Center is where you watch it happen.
Book a search strategy call JoinProprietary Search lives in Phase 02, where your deal flow gets built. It follows Phase 01 preparation and feeds everything after the LOI. See how Phase 02 works
Your buy box is the filter; the whole ecosystem is what runs through it. Good brokers bring prepared sellers and deals that actually close, and your Command Center includes a Broker CRM to track every listing and relationship against your thesis. The off-market side is what we build by hand. Both converge in one pipeline.
Brokered deals reach every prepared buyer at once, so the advantage goes to buyers who are ready, financed, and decisive. Your Broker CRM is the one center for this side: every broker relationship tracked, their listings a click away, and every deal logged against your buy box, so when a listing fits, you move first.
Most owners who will sell in the next few years have not called anyone yet. We build that side for you: a verified universe of owners who fit your thesis, personal outreach, and follow-up that never slips, for as long as owner timelines take.
Your buy box, sharpened together: industry, geography, size, and what a real target looks like, turned into criteria a search can actually run on.
We map your market and build a universe of companies that fit, with emphasis on off-market, owner-operated businesses, enriched with ownership, tenure, and contact detail.
Every name gets checked by hand before anyone spends outreach on it. Ownership changes quietly in private markets. The list is not the work. Checking the list is the work.
Outreach is designed like a go-to-market strategy: how you are positioned, what the message says, which channels carry it, and which lane goes first. Then it runs personally, never a template, on a cadence built for owners who answer on the third or fourth touch.
When a conversation turns into a deal, the rest of the system engages: lenders, QoE providers, and M&A counsel from our vetted bench, through your first year of ownership.
The search keeps moving even in the weeks your other work takes over.
Most searches stall because the buy box was never checked against reality: the right industry at a size where no independent companies actually exist, or a geography where every strong operator already belongs to someone. We treat the buy box as work product, not paperwork.
A thesis session turns your intent into a runnable buy box: industry, geography, size, revenue quality, exclusions, and the advantages only you bring, written as criteria a search can actually execute.
The first market pass is the test. It shows whether your market really holds independent companies at your size, where the depth is, and which lane deserves the search, before a single letter is sent.
The buy box evolves as the market answers. A lane that runs dry gets replaced, a finding that surprises gets followed, and every refresh re-verifies that the thesis still matches the territory.
We would rather show you the checking than describe it. These numbers come from our own market passes, and they are the reason the outreach works.
Twenty-five companies matched one buyer's criteria on paper. Nineteen fell out under hand-checking: one belonged to a regional chain mid-expansion, one said on its own about page that it was part of a 120-location company, one had been sold to a national brand the year before and nothing about it said so. Six earned the right to hear from the buyer. That is the bar every universe gets built to, before a single letter is sent.
Active searches are running through this system right now, and our team spends every week hands-on inside operating companies, including one that was itself bought through a search. We know what the first year of ownership actually demands, because we are in it with our clients right now.
Ownership changes quietly, and nothing announces it. In market after market we have checked, companies that looked independent turned out to belong to chains, funds, or franchises.
| Membership You run the search |
Proprietary Search We run it for you |
|
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Your Command Center and Broker CRM set up around your buy box, with a clear plan for how you position yourself and where to start. Optional Market Research adds the thesis session and a hand-checked first pass | A private thesis session with our search team, your buy box built into a runnable search with its go-to-market designed, and a hand-verified market pass delivered before any outreach begins |
| Universe & verification | Yours to build with the system’s tools and templates. Add Market Research and the list we build is hand-checked, then refreshed monthly with changes flagged for a fresh check | Built to exhaust your market and checked into intelligence: every lane gets pulled, and every surviving name carries ownership, tenure, succession signals, and the reason it belongs in front of you |
| Outreach & follow-up | Runs from your own inbox with templates and cadence guidance; replies come straight to you, and follow-up is yours to run, tracked in your Command Center | We contact owners on your behalf, personally and researched, qualify replies before they reach you, and run the follow-up on a cadence that never slips, adjusted wave by wave, visible in your Command Center |
| Expert bench | Full access, with experts curated and suggested for where your deal stands; you engage them and bring them up to speed | Experts arrive already briefed: we run your search, so every expert we bring in starts inside your deal, at the right moment, with nothing to re-explain |
| Investor reporting | Your search metrics live in your Command Center, yours to share any time | A monthly investor-ready search report for your cap table: passes run, companies checked and verified, pipeline stages, and the catches that saved you wasted letters |
| Price | $295 / month or $2,950 / year. Optional Market Research, $350, included with annual membership | An engagement scoped to your market. Every number in writing before you commit |
Same system, same universe quality, same bench behind it. The difference is whose hands are on the outreach.
Most off-market sourcing engagements are priced like investment banking: retainers that run whether or not the pipeline produces, and fees that scale with the deal. We priced this for searchers instead. The search itself is deliberately inexpensive, and we stay with you through every phase, the deal, the close, and the first year inside the business, so our incentives are your incentives. Every number is walked through plainly on a call, in writing, before you commit to anything.
No. Our work is the off-market side: the owners no listing can show you. That is where we build the universe, verify every name, and run the outreach. Far from replacing brokers, we help you work with them well. Your Broker CRM is the one center for the listed side: every broker relationship tracked, their listings a click away, deals logged, and response rates watched, all alongside the search. If a brokered listing happens to fit your buy box, we pass it to you and you work it with that broker directly; no fee of ours attaches to it. We are not a business broker, and we never take listing-side compensation.
The search itself is deliberately inexpensive. Exact numbers depend on the scope of your market and your search, so we walk every number through plainly on a call and put it in writing before you commit to anything.
Yes. Your thesis, your universe, and your pipeline are visible only to you and the team running your search. We never publish a member's market, targets, or terms, and anything we write publicly about the checking work names only companies that were cut from consideration, never a live target.
The universe gets built and verified before any outreach begins, because a letter sent to the wrong company costs more than the days it takes to check. From there, outreach runs continuously and owners answer on their own timelines, most on the third or fourth touch. What we promise is a search that never goes quiet, not artificial speed.
A first pass checks the strongest slice of your market, typically twenty-five to fifty names that match your buy box on paper, and roughly one in four or five survives the checking: our real record across recent passes runs from five verified independents on a small pass to seventeen on a deep one. From there, monthly refreshes keep your list true and add new matches as the market moves, and additional passes aim at new lanes or geographies when you want more coverage. If a bigger number matters to you, anyone can sell you two hundred names; about three-quarters of them will not survive checking. We would rather hand you the ones that do.
No. The first step of every engagement is a thesis session that turns your intent into a runnable buy box, and if you are earlier than that, free membership and the Phase 01 community are built for exactly where you are. If you want help before committing to anything, Market Research stands on its own: $350, no subscription, a thesis session plus a hand-checked report of the verified targets in your market, and the full amount credits toward membership if you join within thirty days. The right time to talk is before the search starts, not after it stalls.
Yes, and it changes shape for you in four ways. Your engagement can run parallel passes across markets, lanes compared against each other, because a fund’s search is rarely one city. It includes a monthly investor-ready search report, the numbers your cap table actually wants, generated from the work itself rather than reconstructed the night before an update. Because a funded searcher is pitched by everyone, we act as a second opinion on outside vendors, the data tools, coaching programs, and retainer firms competing for your budget, where we have no economics. And on cost, compare us to the traditional route: hiring an analyst to source for you costs several times as much once recruiting and managing them is counted, and their judgment is the product. One disclosure we make in writing: some QoE providers and SBA lenders on our bench pay us an engagement fee when you engage them. We disclose it, and it never changes who we suggest.
A capped number at any one time. Every name in every universe gets checked by hand, and that bar sets our capacity. The team grows as our searchers do, every checker is trained to the same verification standard before they touch a universe, but we never take on engagements faster than the standard allows. If we are at capacity for your market, we will tell you on the call and hold your place honestly.
Thirty minutes: where you are in the journey, what your buy box looks like, and what a verified first pass of your market would show. If we are a fit, the search starts the same week.
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