For those doing proprietary search: how are you actually building your target lists? I have been talking with buyers going after trades and home services businesses, and the sourcing process sounds brutal. One searcher told me his workflow was scrolling Google Maps city by city, using review counts as a rough revenue proxy, hiring someone on Upwork to find emails, then sending handwritten direct mail. Weeks of work before a single conversation. Meanwhile, the brokered side has its own problem: everyone is bidding on the same listings, and the good ones get competitive fast. So I am curious how people here handle it. If you are doing proprietary outreach, how do you decide which businesses are even worth contacting? What signals do you use to guess size or quality before you ever talk to the owner? And for those who have gone off market successfully, was the deal actually better than what you saw through brokers, or just less competitive? Would love to hear what is working for people.