All of the success stories I've heard of late seem to have one of three common themes:
1) they acquired pre-COVID and received a huge boost from some tangential tailwind

2) they acquired before internet marketing caught on for the small business folks and SAAS services began providing scale support.

3) they found an off-market deal with a lower than average multiple and used the high relative cash flow to fuel growth/acquisition before PE began rolling up smaller businesses.


My question now is that while 1 and 2 are off the table (unlikely black swan and the cat is out of the bag on internet marketing), I'm not so sure on number 3. How saturated is the market today relative to 3-5 years ago on the search side, and are there still good deals to be had out there?