Most effective strategy for proprietary sourcing?

October 15, 2025

by a searcher from Harvard University - Harvard Business School in Miami, FL, USA

What’s been the most effective strategy for proprietary sourcing lately? Would love to hear what’s working best for others in the community. Thanks!

5 Likes

15 Replies

221 Views

Replies

Reply by a searcher
from The University of Michigan in Portland, OR, USA

This is my high-level opinion, but the best approach depends on you and your circumstances, but I would put a proprietary search into 2 categories. Quantitative and Qualitative. Quantitative is doing a search by trying to reach out to as many business owners as possible and hoping the right one will respond. I think of using databases and an email, post mail, or phone campaign to reach out to as many possible. There are many who want to sell their services to help you do that. Quantitative is basically networking, researching, and face-to-face meetings to find owners who might be ready to sell. This is my preferred approach as it aligns more with my personal goals, values, and circumstances. It has also worked well for me. Each approach overlaps with each other. You want a high quality message when cold calling owners in a quantitative approach. And, you want to make more connections faster with a qualitative approach. In the end, as many who have searched and found a proprietary deal might attest, it will happen when it happens. Effort and the right message are the common ingredients.

Reply by a searcher
in Charlottesville, VA, USA

I built a tool for my proprietary search using the PPP Loan dataset. Made it so I can filter all 12M loans by NAICS, geographic proximity, and also created estimated revenue/ebitda margins filters. My friends told me to make it public after they used it. www.pppfinder.com. It doesn't have phone numbers or contact info but it does have all the loan info for each company and could be a good starting point for then using a third party on fiverr (or similar) to email scrape. Feedback is welcome on how to improve it and if you want to use it for free just DM me and I'll give you a code :) ^redacted‌ ^redacted‌ ^redacted‌ ^redacted‌ ^redacted‌ ^redacted‌ ^redacted‌

+13 more replies.

Join the discussion