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

searcher profile

May 06, 2022

by a searcher from Rice University - Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business in Katy, TX, USA

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.

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commentor profile
Reply by a searcher
from Ivey Business School at Western University in Vancouver, BC, Canada
Personally focused in on one small geographic market (British Columbia) but typically my partner and I are evaluating ~1-2 new brokered deals per week. We indexed more heavily on proprietary outreach at outset but given the geographic focus we would reach and get through an entire population of companies in a given niche of interest rather quickly. That outreach and relationships established with business owners we believe will pay dividends later but we have since pivoted to spending majority of our time being responsive to brokered/banked opportunities within our geographic market such that we can differentiate by being local and diving in deeper than other parties.
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Reply by a searcher
from Northwestern University in Minneapolis, MN, USA
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?

redacted‌ 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.
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