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.

Entrepreneurship through acquisition networking comes down to five groups: your investors, the brokers who bring deals, the lenders who finance them, the advisors who meet owners first, and other searchers. Each group matters most in a different phase of the search, so the work is keeping the right ones recent at the right time.

Month 11 of your search. You are under LOI on a landscaping business. Your days are QoE calls, the lender’s checklist and the purchase agreement. You have not texted a broker in seven weeks. Two investors last heard from you in the quarterly update.

Then the QoE comes back ugly, and you need every one of those people again by Friday.

Why is ETA a relationship business?

Because the search is long and the deals come from people. Stanford GSB reports that acquiring a company typically takes around 20 months, and that about half of search funds launched between 2021 and 2024 acquired a company.

Where the deals come from is just as telling. In the IESE and Stanford International Search Funds 2024 study, international searchers ranked proprietary search as the predominant source of deal flow, at 64 percent against 37 percent for third party sources. Proprietary there includes your personal network and your investor network. Brokers and banks sit on the third party side. Both are people.

The same study found that nearly 40 percent of searchers who had not signed an LOI in their first 12 months did not acquire a business. Pace matters, and pace comes from how many people are sending you things.

Who do you need to know in entrepreneurship through acquisition networking?

Five groups, and each one wants something different from you.

1. Investors. Search investors and the people who backed your fund, or for a self funded search, the equity partners you plan to bring in. They want clear, honest updates and a searcher who asks for help early.
2. Brokers and intermediaries. They want a buyer who answers fast, passes with a reason, and can close. Recency decides who gets the call. See how searchers keep 200 brokers warm without a VA.
3. Lenders. Most searchers in the US touch SBA financing. The SBA 7(a) program lists changes of ownership as an allowed use, up to $5 million. A lender who knows you closes faster and often knows which brokers send clean files.
4. Advisors who meet owners early. CPAs, estate attorneys, wealth managers. They hear “I am thinking about selling” years before a broker does.
5. Other searchers and operators. Peers, former searchers who now run companies, and the people you met at the Booth Kellogg ETA Conference. They pass you deals, lenders and warnings.

Who matters most in each phase of a search?

The groups do not all matter at once. Here is the map I would use. The cadence is my view, not a rule.

Phase	Who matters most	What to send them
Raising the search	Investors, former searchers	Your thesis, and who they think you should meet
Early search	Brokers, advisors, other searchers	Your buy box, and fast clear passes
Under LOI	Lender, investors, attorneys	Short, honest progress notes
LOI dies	Brokers, runner up owners, advisors	Back in market, same buy box
After close	Everyone who helped	Thanks, and what you would buy next

The phase that breaks searchers is the third one. Under LOI, the deal eats everything, and the brokers and advisors in rows two and four go quiet. When the LOI dies, you are restarting cold. The five texts to send that day are in your LOI fell through, text these five people today.

How do you keep investors close without spamming them?

One honest note when something real happens, and a standing quarterly update. Investors do not need a weekly newsletter. They need to hear about the LOI before the update, and about the dead LOI the day it dies.

Ask them for one specific thing each time. A lender they trust. A former searcher in your industry. An owner in their portfolio’s supply chain. Investors who are asked well tend to send names.

How do you stay useful to other searchers?

Pass them deals. Every week you will see businesses outside your box: wrong geography, wrong size, wrong industry. Send them to the searcher who wants exactly that, with a one line reason.

That is the intro habit. I have facilitated over 1,000 introductions, and the pattern I have seen is simple: the people who make introductions get remembered. Searchers who send deals to peers get deals back.

The weekly ten minutes

Here is how I would run entrepreneurship through acquisition networking in ten minutes a day.

1. Every morning, pick five people. At least one broker, and one from another group.
2. Send each a note with a real reason. A listing they posted, a deal they closed, a firm change, a deal you can pass them.
3. Keep each note to a text. Two lines. No “just checking in.”
4. When a deal goes under LOI, keep going. Five people a day is how the brokers stay warm while you are buried.
5. Log one detail after every call. What they want, what they are working on. That detail is the next reason.

I learned the logging part in political fundraising. I raised $3M with a manual tracking system: after every call I wrote down what mattered to the person and used it next time. It worked, and it took hours a week by hand.

The system I built for this

That is why I built FRONT OF MIND. It opens on your 10 minutes for today. Each person has a one line reason 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 pipeline deal quiet 7+ days, or they are going cold.

Ask Liala out loud, “who do I know that is an SBA lender,” and get the right people with why. At a conference, say a name and a sentence out loud, snap a badge, and it is filed under the event. Every draft is a text style message, 40 words max, and nothing sends without your tap.

Your contacts are encrypted, no one on our team looks at them, and you can export and delete anytime. It runs in your phone’s browser and saves to your home screen. The full system for buyers is in the deal flow for business buyers hub.

If FRONT OF MIND doesn’t surface people in your network worth reaching out to within 72 hours, we’ll refund you. No questions asked.

Start free with your first 25 contacts and see who comes up first. See how it works

See how it works