By Brett Kaufman. 8 years using relationships to build sales pipelines, from political fundraising to a 7 figure business to running matchmaking for two communities. Over 1,000 introductions facilitated.

How do you source add on acquisitions? Build the target list from data, then win the deal through people: the owners you keep warm for years, and the CPAs, wealth advisors and attorneys around them who see a sale coming first. The list is the easy part. Being the buyer the owner calls is the whole game.

Here is the scene. Two years ago your platform CEO met the founder of a competitor at a trade show. Good conversation. The founder said “not yet, maybe in a couple of years.” Someone logged it. Nobody followed up after that.

Last month he sold to another platform. His CPA made the intro. You had the better fit and a team he already respected. You were not the one he had heard from lately.

Everyone has the same target list

Add ons are the main event in private equity now. Grata, citing Bain’s 2023 Private Equity Report, notes that add ons made up 72% of North American buyout transactions in 2022.

That means a lot of buyers are mapping the same fragmented markets. The databases help. Market maps, revenue estimates, hiring signals, conference attendee lists. Sourcescrub’s guide to finding add ons recommends exactly that: start the add on plan at the thesis stage, map the ecosystem around the platform and scrub the attendee lists of the industry conferences where these companies show up.

All good advice. And your competitors bought the same tools. If every platform in your space has the same 300 names, the list is not your edge. What happens after the list is.

The owner decides, and he calls who he remembers

A founder who built a $6 million business over 25 years does not run a search when he is ready. He thinks of the two or three buyers he trusts and has heard from lately. Maybe one of them sent a note when his company won an award. Maybe one asked about his daughter’s wedding.

Your letter from 2024 is not on that short list. The buyer who texted in August is.

This is the same rule that runs broker deal flow: recency beats reputation. It is even stronger with owners, because an owner sells once. He wants to sell to someone he knows.

The people who know first

Owners rarely announce that they are getting ready. The signs show up in the people around them.

Grata’s July 2026 piece on why proprietary deal flow is getting harder lists what sale preparation tends to look like: owners bring in a controller to professionalize the financials, start talking to wealth advisors, or begin attending new industry conferences. None of it is announced.

Read that list again as a map of who to know.

The CPA who suddenly has to produce clean, reviewed financials. More in CPAs as a deal source.

The wealth advisor planning what the owner does with the proceeds. More in wealth managers as a deal source.

The estate attorney working on succession. More in estate planning attorneys know who is selling before brokers do.

The peers at the conference where an owner you never saw before is suddenly walking the floor.

A database might pick up the controller hire weeks later. The CPA knew the day he got the call.

Your platform already has a network

Most add on plans skip the best source they own: the platform itself.

The founder you bought from knows every competitor in his region. He has had dinner with half of them. His sales leaders know which owners are tired. His vendors serve the same companies you want to buy. His customers buy from them too.

That is a referral network you paid for in the purchase price. Most buyers let it sit unused, because nobody owns the job of staying in touch with it.

Holdco builders have the same asset on a smaller scale. Every company you own brings its owner’s relationships, its suppliers and its local CPA. The next deal often sits one introduction away from the last one.

What a working add on cadence looks like

This is illustrative, not a benchmark.

Say your space has 60 owners worth knowing and another 30 CPAs, advisors and attorneys around them. That is 90 relationships, most of which will take years to turn into a deal.

You do not need to talk to all 90 every week. You need three things.

1. A real reason every time. The owner’s company was in the local paper. The CPA posted about a new partner. You met at the trade show 60 days ago and never followed up. A reason tied to their world, not “checking in.”
2. A warning before it goes cold. If an owner who said “not yet” has not heard from you in six months, you want to know now, not when the press release goes out.
3. Ten minutes, not a project. The platform CEO and the deal team are running a business. If staying in touch takes an afternoon, it will not happen.

That is the same system any good intermediary relationship needs. There is a longer version in how to build proprietary deal flow from your existing network.

The system that runs this

That is why I built FRONT OF MIND. It is the tracking I used to do by hand, run every morning.

You open the app to your 10 minutes for today. Each person has one line saying why today: they posted, their company was in the news, you met at an event and never followed up, a follow up is due, a deal in your pipeline has been quiet 7 days, or they are going cold.

Every draft is a text style message, 40 words max. Nothing sends without your tap, and it learns from your edits. Posts are only shown if they are confirmed to belong to that person.

At the trade show, say a name and a sentence out loud, snap a badge or a business card, and it is filed under the event. Later, ask Liala “who do I know that is a CPA in Ohio” and get the right people with why.

Your contacts are encrypted. No one on our team looks at them. Export or delete anytime.

Start free with your first 25 contacts. Put in the owners who told you “not yet” and see who comes up first. See how it works

See how it works