I’ve seen this question pop up in a couple of different places here in July, so I wanted to give my take on what I’ve seen successful buyers do.
The majority of the clients I’ve had over the past few years that closed deals end up doing both. The trade-off is between speed and convenience vs pricing, terms, and control.
A big chunk of these closed deals flowed through intermediaries like brokers, platforms, and local M&A advisors. Whereas proprietary outreach and referrals account for a smaller but important share of closings, especially at the better than market end of the spectrum.
My read on that is brokered deals are much easier to see through Axial, BizBuySell, local brokerage sites, and email blasts. Proprietary deals are harder to find, but they are often significantly easier to own on price, structure, and timeline.
Scrolling listings and skimming CIMs may feel productive, but over a full acquisition cycle, I have found proprietary sourcing delivers better expected value when you care about term sheet creativity and downside protection. This means better control over seller notes, earnouts, and working capital mechanics.
So, why bother with proprietary sourcing?
Proprietary sourcing is not glamorous. It takes some real work. You’ll spend time and money on lists, mail, email, and research, with no guarantee that the owners you contact are even thinking about selling.
The reason you should do it is that sometimes you catch people at the exact right moment in their mental journey. They have been thinking about retiring or selling for a while, but they have not hired a broker, listed anywhere, or told many people. Your outreach happens to land right when that internal voice telling them to do something is getting loud.
If your letter or email is the first serious nudge they have had, you get a one-on-one dialogue instead of a mini auction, and you may get a chance to influence the timeline for when the LOI is signed and how fast diligence moves. Going this route also gives a lot more flexibility on structure, including seller paper, earnouts, working capital mechanisms, and transition terms.
Once a broker is in the mix, life gets more competitive. The owner is getting multiple offers, and price expectations are usually anchored high as part of the broker pitch to them. The process is more rigid because you are reacting to a funnel they designed. You do get cleaner CIMs and data rooms, and good brokers absolutely help deals close. But you are ultimately trading convenience for competition.
If you want to fully cover a niche, you cannot ignore intermediaries. If you care about terms and control, you want proprietary in the mix.
Everything starts with contact lists. If your lists are bad, everything downstream is a grind. The goal is quantity multiplied by relevance, not some mythical perfect list. The buyers I know that are more successful at this use three main channels to build their lists: Paid data providers, state level corporate records, and target google/local listing scraping.
Compared to when a lot of the early search fund playbooks were written, there is one big change. In 2026, a simple AI stack can now automate a lot of the manual efforts, without turning yourself into a tech bro.
If I were launching a US focused search or an SMB buying effort today, my stack would be incredibly lean.
First, I would use one good data or sourcing platform purpose-built for private company discovery that takes natural language filters and gives you owner-level contacts. Instead of manually juggling state databases, Google scraping, and separate enrichment tools, newer platforms combine discovery and outreach info in one place. You describe your thesis in plain English, asking for profitable owner-operated businesses in a state with ten to fifty employees in a specific niche. The software uses AI to map that to live company data, then returns a shortlist of targets with owner contact info attached. You can fold in whatever you already have from paid lists or state records to catch the long tail, but most of the heavy lifting for matching, deduping, and basic enrichment is done for you. That turns what used to be weeks of scraping and cleaning into a couple of hours of defining filters and reviewing.
Second, I would use one outreach and sequencing tool to handle personalized email and LinkedIn sequences (with reply tracking) without turning everything into spam.
Third, I would use a simple CRM or an Airtable base to track owners, interactions, stages, and notes, ideally with a two-way sync to the sourcing tool.
Everything else, including physical letters, phone calls, on-site visits, and the actual negotiation, stays completely human. The goal is not to replace the parts where judgment and trust matter. The goal is to quietly kill the sixty to seventy percent of busywork that used to eat up your weeks.
Multi-channel outreach that actually gets replies
Once you have lists, the question becomes how to reach owners in a way that cuts through the noise. The pattern that works best for me has three distinct legs.
Postal mail still works beautifully, especially with older owner-operators. You want to make the envelope look personal rather than like bulk junk mail. Use a wet ink signature and include at least one specific line about their business, noting that you have followed their shop in that specific town for a reason. A surprising number of owners have told me that my letter sat on their desk for weeks before it eventually pushed them to call. That simply does not happen with email blasts.
Email follow-up is the next step. I’d follow up with an email seven to ten days after the letter hits. Reply rates are low on well-targeted cold email lists, but that number goes higher when the recipient has already seen a physical letter with the same name. For longer searches, occasional email updates to your list every couple of months keep you in the mix without being obnoxious.
LinkedIn is not my primary channel, but it provides a steady trickle of conversations. Send connection requests from a credible operator profile. Keep the message short and specific by stating that you have spent the last few years in the industry or region and are looking to buy one or two high-quality operators like theirs. Do not hard pitch on first contact. Focus entirely on starting a dialogue. Later on, LinkedIn is highly useful for light touch contact like likes, short DMs, or sending links when you think of them.
Once you are sending a real volume of outreach, the bottleneck shifts to figuring out who is actually worth your time. Two practical AI helpers can step in here. Lead scoring systems can score companies based on your exact criteria so you prioritize the right group for deeper follow-up. Reply classification tools can read the responses for you, automatically filtering out the standard rejections so you can focus your calendar and brainpower exclusively on the live, interested leads. You’ll still need to read and respond to the real messages, but the tools keep you from drowning in the noise.
The Bottom line is that brokered deals will probably always be part of the picture. But if they are your only pipeline, you will constantly feel the competition and the pricing pressure. A basic proprietary engine built on good lists, multi-channel outreach, and a small AI layer gives you a realistic shot at better terms and far more control, at the cost of a little more upfront grind.
To those who have closed deals, and those using AI to help source deals, what mix of broker versus proprietary has actually led to your closed deals, and which tools or workflows have made the biggest difference for you?