According to Stanford GSB, the average search takes 2 years. We've worked with 25+ searchers. And the pattern we keep seeing has nothing to do with deal quality. It has everything to do with capacity. The searches that stall don't usually stall because the searcher picked the wrong industry or couldn't raise capital. They stall because the searcher is doing everything themselves, and the operational weight quietly wins. Here's what we've observed across the searchers we've worked with. The ones who struggle are almost always stuck in the same loop. Writing outreach, building lists, updating the CRM, following up on cold contacts, researching targets, logging calls. Every week. By themselves. And somewhere between all of that, they're supposed to be evaluating businesses, talking to investors and refining their thesis. The ones who close are not necessarily smarter or better networked. Most of the time, they had already solved the capacity problem. They recognised that outreach and pipeline management are execution problems, not strategy problems. And they stopped trying to be the person who did it all. Stanford's 2024 study puts the average search at around two years. In our experience, the searches that run long aren't running long because good deals don't exist. They're running long because the searcher never had enough consistent outreach volume to build real pipeline momentum in the first place. That's the thing about sourcing. It rewards consistency over intensity. One big push followed by two quiet weeks doesn't move the needle. Steady, disciplined outreach over months does. That's exactly the problem a good Virtual Assistant solves. Not as a shortcut, but as the infrastructure that lets you actually run the search the way it needs to be run. If this resonates with where you are right now, drop a comment or send me a message, and let's discuss how you can acquire business faster.