What did you "budget" for search?

by a searcher from Dartmouth College - Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth

1 year ago

The GSB search fund primer, specifically the PPM attachment, gives  cost categories for search (salary, benefits, travel, legal, etc.) but is silent on market rates for those costs. 

Two categories of costs are particularly hard to know - costs associated with search (like software) and deal costs (legal, diligence, etc.)

Are folks allocating budget for search software (Zoominfo, Pitchbook, Hubspot, etc.)? Are there other non-software costs to account?

What are reasonable budgets for legal, diligence, accounting? Are folks making a provision for N broken deals (maybe 2?) as part of their budget? 

Thanks!

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4 comments

searcher from Harvard University - Harvard Business School

The costs range quite a bit depending on the focus of your search and other factors around your target. Some key factors are, target deal size, self funded vs funded, partnered or solo, regional vs national, broker vs proprietary all have a large impact. For some of your specific questions, you should budget for software/tech costs but these will likely be small compared with salary and diligence costs. Legal fees can go from $10-25k (bare bones small deal) to $350k (large top end SF legal team). We ended at ~$150k with 1 deal broken early on. PM if you want to talk in more detail.

1 year ago | like reply | 0 likes

searcher from Harvard University - Harvard Business School

Hi Bradley - very happy to help you here go through and work out how to be economical on searching

1 year ago | like reply | 0 likes

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