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.

Proprietary deal flow is a stream of acquisition opportunities that come to you directly, before or instead of a broker or banker running a competitive process. You build it by being the first person the brokers, bankers, lawyers, CPAs and owners already in your network think of, not by meeting more people.

The numbers say this channel is real. In a Journal of Financial Economics survey, private equity investors considered almost 48 percent of their closed deals proprietary in some way, and searchers rank direct contact with owners as their top deal source (IESE and Stanford). More numbers are on our deal flow statistics page.

Here is the scene. You scroll your phone looking for someone else and pass a banker you worked a process with two years ago. A broker who sent you a teaser last spring. An owner who mentioned an exit over dinner. You think, I should reach out. You do not. By Friday you have forgotten again.

That is the whole problem. Not your network. Your recency.

The network you have vs the network you are using

If you have done deal work for a few years, you already have the network. Brokers from past processes. M&A bankers from raises and deals. Lawyers who have worked multiple transactions. CPAs with business owner clients. Family office principals who co invest or look at direct deals. Operators who have sold and stay plugged in to the market.

Those names are in your contact list. They are not in your deal flow.

The gap is almost never relationship quality. The relationships are good. The gap is time. Say half of those people have not heard from you in over 90 days. To a broker building a short list for a new mandate, you are a past relationship, not a current one. Past relationships do not get the first call.

What I tell people is simple. Proprietary deal flow is what comes out the other end of being a current relationship with the right people. The path runs straight through the contacts you already have.

It also has a daily clock. Today, someone you already know is sitting on something you could push forward: a banker who just moved firms, a broker with a fresh mandate, a founder who mentioned an exit last spring. The question is whether anything puts that person in front of you this morning.

Step one: map the deal sources

Start by separating your deal network from everyone else in your phone.

Your deal network is everyone who could plausibly send you an off market opportunity in the next 12 months. That includes:

• Brokers covering your target sectors and geographies.
• M&A bankers who have worked deals in your space.
• Deal lawyers who know which clients are thinking about exits.
• CPAs with business owner clients at the stage you acquire.
• Family office principals who see direct deal flow.
• Operators who have sold and stay close to transaction activity.
• Former clients who have referred deals.
• Referral partners in adjacent industries.

Pull those names into one list. It will not be hundreds. Say it is 40. Those 40 are the relationships your proprietary deal flow comes from, and they deserve more of your attention than the other thousand combined.

Step two: audit the recency

For each person on that list, write down when you last had a real exchange. Be strict about what counts. A LinkedIn connection does not count. A cold email they never answered does not count. A text thread, a call, a coffee, a real email back and forth does.

Then sort the list into three groups.

Inside 30 days. Your active relationships. They are on the short list. For most people this is the smallest group.

30 to 90 days. Warm but fading. One good note this week brings them back.

Over 90 days. Many will be over a year. These are past relationships that need to be reactivated. They are not on anyone’s short list today. If you just came out of a long deal, this is probably your biggest group.

The deal flow you are not seeing is sitting in that third group.

Step three: reactivate with real notes

Reactivation does not need an explanation of why you went quiet. No confession. No apology for the gap. It needs a note that proves you are paying attention to their world today.

Here is how I would write it. One specific reference to something real: a deal they closed, a sector they cover, a firm change, something they published. One question they will want to answer. No ask.

For someone who has been cold for a year, that note restarts the clock. If they reply, you are a current relationship again. The next few touches over the following weeks lock that in.

Do not try to wake up every cold contact at once. Prioritize by deal potential. Start with the 10 most active intermediaries in the sectors you are buying. Get those back to active first. Then move down the list.

A note like this is short. “Saw you closed the dental group in Tampa. Congrats. Are you seeing more owners in that space thinking about Q1 exits?” That is a text a broker answers. “Just checking in” is a text a broker ignores.

Step four: build the maintenance cadence

Once someone is active again, the job is keeping them active. This is not about friendship or depth. It is about recency.

Here is the cadence I would run. A touch every 30 to 45 days for your tier one intermediaries. Every 45 to 60 days for everyone else. Each note references something real in their world and takes two minutes to write.

The failure mode is running this by hand. You keep it up for a few weeks. Then a deal demands everything you have, the cadence breaks, and by the time you surface you are reactivating the same people again. That is not a discipline problem. Your discipline is fine. It is all being spent on the deal in front of you.

The fix is a system that does the tracking for you. It watches what your contacts are doing, surfaces who to reach out to today and why, and drafts the note. You review and send. Ten minutes a day. The cadence keeps running even when you are deep in diligence.

What it looks like when the system is working

When your deal network is active and maintained, the deal flow that reaches you changes character.

You hear earlier. Before the deal goes wide. Sometimes before there is a formal mandate at all. A broker calls to ask if you would be interested before she brings the seller to the table. That call only goes to people she has been talking to.

You get more off market looks. The deals that never go to a formal process: direct seller to buyer, one or two intermediaries involved, done quietly. Those go to the short list, and the short list is built from recency.

The relationships compound. A broker who sends you a deal you pass on, with a clear and fast reason, remembers that. She comes back. Over years, the buyers who stay recent with the right intermediaries become the first call on every new mandate in the space.

That is proprietary deal flow. Not a list. Not a database. A set of current, warm relationships with the people most likely to send you deals, built from the contacts you already have and maintained with a system that does not need more hours than you have.

Here is how FRONT OF MIND runs it

I built FRONT OF MIND because I watched operators meet the right people, have real conversations, and then disappear for six months, buried in diligence or a capital raise. By the time they came back up, someone else had the relationship.

It opens on your 10 minutes for today. Each person has a one line reason why today: they posted, a birthday, you met at an event and never followed up, a follow up is due, a pipeline deal has gone quiet 7 days or more, their company was in the news, or they are going cold.

• The draft is written. A text style message, 40 words max, built from the reason. Nothing sends without your tap, and it learns from your edits.
• Posts you can trust. A post only shows up if it is confirmed to belong to that person.
• Ask your network a question. Ask Liala out loud, “who do I know that is an M&A advisor” or “who lives in Miami,” and get the right people with why. That is step one, the deal source map, in a sentence.
• Intros to make this week, with dated proof on both sides, so the intros you make are current and useful.
• Capture in the room. Say a name and a sentence out loud, snap a business card or badge, or take a selfie together, and it is filed under the event.

It runs in your phone’s browser, and you can save it to your home screen. Your contacts are encrypted. No one on our team looks at them. Export and delete anytime.

Key takeaways

• Proprietary deal flow is an output of being a current relationship with the right intermediaries. The path runs through your existing contacts, not a bigger network.
• Your deal sources are a short list inside your phone, likely a few dozen names, and many of them have gone quiet.
• Reactivation takes a real note tied to something specific in their world, followed by a few more touches over the next weeks.
• Maintenance means a touch every 30 to 45 days for tier one intermediaries. A system that tracks, watches and drafts is what keeps it running.
• When the system works, the deal flow changes character: earlier, quieter, less competitive.

Your next deal is sitting in your contact list, and today there is at least one person in it you could move a deal forward with. Spend 10 minutes in FRONT OF MIND this morning and it will show you who, why now, and the note to send. Start free with your first 25 contacts and see who comes up first. For more on why silence is the reason those relationships stop sending deals, see You Didn’t Lose That Deal on Price. You Lost It to Silence.

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. See how it works

Related: How to find off market businesses for sale before a broker lists them and deal sourcing for searchers.

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