Proprietary outbound: yes or no?

TL;DR: Probably yes, if you want to close within a year. We've been watching on-market deal flow at DealMatch for a while now, and here's the breakdown: 300 new deals hit the market every day. This may sound like a lot, but once you start filtering, things get tight: - 40-50 of those have EBITDA over $500k - this reduces to 20 once you cut out restaurants, retail shops, car washes, and medical practices Looking in a specific geography? Now you're looking at maybe 1-2 deals per day Once you actually request the CIM, over 90% of these deals turn out to be outright poor fits for SBA financing. Revenue swings, profitability issues, customer concentration. The result: one viable deal candidate every few weeks. That's just not enough velocity if you're trying to close in a reasonable timeframe. So yes, off-market outreach probably needs to be part of your strategy.