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.

A search fund weekly schedule works when every week has the same fixed blocks: owner outreach most mornings, broker and advisor calls midweek, deal work in the afternoons, investor touches on one set day, and a 20 minute Friday review. When a LOI goes live, you shrink the blocks instead of dropping them.

Tuesday, 9:40 a.m. You meant to start owner calls at 8:30. Instead you answered the lender, rewrote a model, and replied to a broker about a CIM you will probably pass on. The calendar says outreach. Your inbox says otherwise. By Friday you have made eleven calls instead of forty, and you cannot remember which broker you promised to call back.

Here is the week I would run, day by day, and how to change it when a deal takes over.

Why does a searcher need a fixed weekly schedule?

Because a search is long and the urgent work always beats the important work. Stanford GSB’s 2026 study says acquiring a company typically takes around 20 months. IESE’s International Search Funds 2026 study found searchers who acquired averaged 4.6 LOIs, with the first typically signed by month six. The same study stresses keeping an active pipeline through the whole search phase.

That means most weeks of your search are spent on deals that will not close, while the deal that does close is still sitting in a conversation you have not had. A fixed week protects that conversation.

What does a search fund weekly schedule look like?

Here is an illustrative week. Move the hours to fit your time zone and your industry, but keep every block.

Day	Morning	Midday	Afternoon
Monday	Plan the week, pick the 50 owners to contact	Broker list: three calls	Deal work
Tuesday	Owner outreach block	Advisor coffee or call (CPA, attorney, banker)	Deal work
Wednesday	Owner outreach block	Broker calls and new listings	Investor touches: two or three personal notes
Thursday	Owner outreach block	Peer searchers and lenders	Deal work
Friday	Follow ups from the week	Friday review (20 minutes)	Reading, industry work, catch up

Two rules make it hold. Outreach goes first in the day, before the inbox. And every relationship block ends with a note on each person: what they said, what you promised, when to come back.

What goes in each block?

Each block has one job and a short list of people. The search fund deal sourcing guide covers what to send each group. This is when.

1. Owner outreach. Calls, letters and emails to owners on your list, plus follow ups to every owner who said “not now.” When a “not now” owner’s timing changes, you want to be the buyer they heard from last.
2. Broker calls. Three a week, in my view, keeps a list of a dozen brokers recent every month. Mention a specific deal they closed or a listing you looked at. Ask what is coming that is not listed yet.
3. Advisor block. One CPA, estate attorney, banker or wealth advisor a week. These are the people who hear about an owner’s exit before anyone else.
4. Investor touches. Two or three personal notes a week on top of the quarterly update, each with a real reason or a named ask.
5. Peer searchers and lenders. Other searchers pass deals that do not fit them. Lenders know which businesses are refinancing. Both are part of the map of relationships in a search.
6. Deal work. Models, diligence calls, CIM reviews. It fills every hour you give it, which is why it goes after the relationship blocks, not before.

What is in the 20 minute Friday review?

A checklist, the same every week:

1. Owners contacted this week versus your target.
2. Every owner who said “not now,” with a date to come back.
3. Every broker you have not spoken to in 30 days.
4. Every promise you made: a callback, an intro, a document.
5. One investor who has not heard from you personally this quarter.
6. One thing to change next week.

Write the answers down. Next Monday’s plan comes straight from this list.

How do you change the week when a LOI is live?

Shrink the blocks, never delete them. When diligence takes over, the week should look more like this:

Block	Normal week	LOI week
Owner outreach	Three or four mornings	30 minutes, three mornings
Broker calls	Three a week	One or two, short
Advisors	One a week	Pause, unless tied to the deal
Investor touches	Two or three notes	Anchors weekly, others quarterly
Friday review	20 minutes	10 minutes, still every week

The danger is the week you skip the whole thing because the deal feels close. If it dies in quality of earnings, you come back to a pipeline that has been empty for six weeks. That is exactly the hole the 30 day plan to restart a stalled search is written for. Keeping the small blocks running means you rarely need it.

Why do searcher routines break?

They break on memory, not discipline. The outreach block takes an hour when you have to dig through email to find who to call, why, and what you said last time. So it slips to thirty minutes, then to Fridays, then to “after this deal.”

The schedule is the easy part. The list that feeds it each morning is the hard part.

The 10 minutes that feed the week

I learned this in political fundraising. I raised $3M with a manual tracking system. After every call I logged what mattered to that person and used it in the next follow up. It worked, and the tracking took hours a week by hand.

That is why I built FRONT OF MIND. It opens on your 10 minutes for today: the owners, brokers, advisors and investors worth a touch right now. Each one has a one line reason why today: they posted, their company was in the news, a follow up is due, a deal in your pipeline has been quiet 7 days, you met at an event weeks ago and never followed up, they are going cold. Each comes with a draft written like a text, 40 words max. Nothing sends without your tap, and it learns from your edits.

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. For how this fits the rest of your deal flow, read deal flow for business buyers.

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

See how it works