Self funded searchers - How many deals are you looking in a week?

by a searcher from Rice University - Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business

May 06,2022

I came across a data suggesting 2000 to 9000 deal outreach "per week" for a self funded searcher before getting to the next stage. Most of the solo, self funded searchers are doing brokered outreach. As per IBISWorld there are only 4,058 Business Brokers Businesses in the US in###-###-#### I am not on the email list for the entire brokers as I am doing a regionally focused search. 

How many deals per week are you are screening at realistically? 
Are you using Interns?
Are you using 3rd party services?
Please comment.

4 likes
164 views
10 comments

searcher from Rice University - Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business

like ^Searchfunder member‌ mentioned, what it meant by review is a big question. For example in the brokered outreach, using bizbuysell as an example, when I choose Texas as my region, I'm having 1500+ deals. When I applied following filters, Must have seller financing, minimum cashflow of 500K, I get only 60 deals. On a rolling 4 week average 1/3rd of the 60 deals become newer one. Similarly on Benchmark International, the current deals in Texas is 68. In the last 6 months the highest I have seen is ~100. Only 1/3rd become newer one in the last 6 months. When I use ebitda filter it is around###-###-#### deals only.

05/09/2022 | like reply | 0 likes

searcher from Northwestern University

I saw the 2,000-9,000 stats in the Live Oak Bank webinar on Friday, May 6th, and I thought that sounded extremely high. I can't imagine reaching out to 2,000 unique new prospects per week and running a quality process to handle the replies and calls generated from that. Maybe the stat was intended to mean a searcher sending 2,000 automated emails per week?

Searchfunder member‌ from Evermore has shared some stats on Twitter about their outreach here: https://twitter.com/J_M_Vogt/status/1405354560680509441. I think that tweet is from when Justin and his partner were 9-10 months in. I think the math works out roughly to each partner reaching out to 50 new prospects per week. In the replies, Ayo Phillps says "My reply rate 5 years ago was 12% and I touched 15k businesses in a 2 year period. I thought those #s were good." If Ayo was at it for 104 weeks, then that works out to 144 new prospects per week.

I've shared some Southport Ventures outreach stats as well: https://twitter.com/n_evans/status/1453417767785349120. We aim for 45-50, high-quality new prospects put into the top of the funnel per week. This initiates the first email to them and then there are follow-up emails from there.

From those benchmarks, you can see that 2,000 new outreaches per week sounds quite high and 9,000/week sounds bonkers.

05/08/2022 | like reply | 3 likes

More on Searchfunder

What CRM systems would you suggest using for your search fund?

CRM recommendation

CRM

Pool service routes and consolidation strategy

$200k equity partner desired for Inc. 5000 Acquisition

Acquiring the Land/Property with a Deal

Seeking cash flow lender for $7m add-on acquisition with $2m EBITDA

Recommendations on CRMs?

Searchfunder is an online community and toolkit for searchfunds. Over 80% of those involved in searchfunds maintain a Searchfunder.com account to help them network, problem solve challenges, and keep up with the industry.

We maintain partnerships with database providers that make searching more effective, efficient and affordable along with features that help searchers find deals and investors and vice versa.