Brokered deals vs Private Outreach: takeaways from Think Big, Buy Small
June 23, 2025
by a professional in London, UK
Every searcher thinks they've cracked the code. Don’t go for brokered deals! Proprietary is the only way! The debates rage on, fueled by survivorship bias.
We figured someone should actually count: we parsed every Think Big, Buy Small (https://www.hbs.edu/news/podcasts/think-big-buy-small) episode featuring successful US deals - that's Rick Ruback and Royce Yudkoff interviewing searchers who exited with actual businesses rather than PowerPoint decks and regret.
The finding: a beautiful almost even split across broker/network/proprietary sourcing with a slight preference towards prop (the total number of successful searchers that Ruback and Yudkoff interviewed was rather small to draw any statistically significant conclusions though).
Geography Is Destiny: Narrow focus? Proprietary dominates. Geographic flexibility? Broker networks win decisively. This makes sense. One searcher made it sound as if he could talk to every single business in Vermont!
The Infrastructure Problem: Broker gatekeeping has intensified over the past decade—a rational response to increased buyer competition.
The obvious inefficiency? Managing multiple broker relationships while evaluating endless CIMs represents exactly the operational friction that technology should eliminate.
DealMatch (https://getdealmatch.com) functions as a Bloomberg terminal for search fund deal flow—aggregating sources, standardizing data, automating routine interactions. As your criteria evolve, the platform adapts.
Think of it as outsourcing the boring parts to someone who enjoys spreadsheets.
Reality Check: Does this align with your experience? Are we missing obvious variables? Have we fallen victim to selection bias that would make a first-year analyst cringe?
P.S. Full dataset available upon request. Nothing settles arguments like properly structured spreadsheets.
Geography Is Destiny: Narrow focus? Proprietary dominates. Geographic flexibility? Broker networks win decisively. This makes sense. One searcher made it sound as if he could talk to every single business in Vermont!
The Infrastructure Problem: Broker gatekeeping has intensified over the past decade—a rational response to increased buyer competition.
The obvious inefficiency? Managing multiple broker relationships while evaluating endless CIMs represents exactly the operational friction that technology should eliminate.
DealMatch (https://getdealmatch.com) functions as a Bloomberg terminal for search fund deal flow—aggregating sources, standardizing data, automating routine interactions. As your criteria evolve, the platform adapts.
Think of it as outsourcing the boring parts to someone who enjoys spreadsheets.
Reality Check: Does this align with your experience? Are we missing obvious variables? Have we fallen victim to selection bias that would make a first-year analyst cringe?
P.S. Full dataset available upon request. Nothing settles arguments like properly structured spreadsheets.