Deal Origination
The best deals aren’t always on the market. Getting there first starts with the right message.
Direct outreach to founders only works when it doesn’t read like outreach. We research every target individually and write messages worth replying to – before anyone else is in the room.
Most acquisition pipelines rely on the same intermediaries – working the same networks as every other acquirer.
If you want deals that aren’t already competitive, you have to reach founders and owners before they engage an adviser.
Direct outreach to business owners only works if it doesn’t read like outreach. A generic email from an unknown acquirer gets deleted. What earns a reply is a message that demonstrates understanding of someone’s business – the moment they’re in, the pressures they’re navigating, the decisions in front of them. That requires research into the individual: not just the company on the target list, but the person running it.
Most outreach to acquisition targets skips that step. Ours doesn’t.
Off-market origination is a time problem as much as a deal problem.
Every hour spent on a meeting that was never going to go anywhere is an hour not spent on one that could have led to a deal. Unqualified target lists don’t just slow acquisitions down – they quietly redirect the most expensive thing your team has – its time. And in the background, the right founders – the ones worth knowing about – are being reached late, reached generically, or not reached at all, maybe even turning up later in another acquirer’s pipeline.
The fix is upstream of outreach. It starts with criteria sharp enough that the wrong companies never enter the list, runs through research deep enough to know a founder’s priorities, and ends with messaging written strategically for that individual. The conversations that follow start with the right people, before anyone else has the chance to reach them.
How we approach origination.
Our AI systems build a structured research dossier on each target – mapping the company, its ownership structure, the founder’s background and stated priorities, their communication style, where they are in their journey. The volume and depth of signals we can pull together on each individual then gives our strategic copywriters a specific angle to write from.
Our strategic copywriters then write messages from scratch, calibrated for each specific business owner, including those who might not yet be looking to sell. The message doesn’t lead with the deal. It leads with evidence of genuine understanding – and opens the door to a warm conversation.
Outreach runs across LinkedIn primarily, with email in parallel. Sequences run over four to six weeks per prospect, with three to eight individually written touchpoints. You see everyone we contact and everything we write throughout.
What this produces
Roughly 62% of founder replies on our current programmes convert to confirmed meetings.
Not every target will respond. But the ones who do are engaging because something in the message landed. That’s where proprietary deal flow comes from: owners who engaged before they were on the market.
We run origination programmes for fund-backed acquirers and corporate development teams across a broad range of sectors.
This is what individual research looks like in practice.
Below are research dossiers on individual founders, and the campaign messages our strategic copywriters produced.
Veterinary practice
Veterinary practice
Founder-owned, PE target
Example client: a PE-backed acquirer building a pipeline of founder-owned independent veterinary practices.
View sample dossierAccountancy practice
Accountancy practice
Regional, owner-managed
Example client: a buy-and-build investor targeting owner-managed regional accountancy practices.
View sample dossierScotch whisky distillery
Scotch whisky distillery
Independent, family-owned
Example client: a family office targeting independent Scotch whisky distilleries.
View sample dossierDeal Origination works best for:
- PE-backed holdcos and platform companies running active acquisition programmes.
- Corporate development teams building off-market pipelines within a defined sector.
- Acquirers whose strategy depends on reaching founders before they engage an adviser.
If you’ve run direct outreach to acquisition targets before and seen poor results, the problem is almost always the same: generic messaging that reads like a form letter. Founders are perceptive – they know immediately when a message wasn’t written for them. Our Partnership Assessment will show you what a different approach looks like in practice.
If your deal flow depends too heavily on intermediaries, this is where a more direct pipeline starts.
Qualification isn’t a final-stage filter. It runs at every stage.
Criteria
You define exactly what makes a prospect worth a conversation.
Score
Our AI pipeline evaluates thousands of leads against those criteria.
Research
Every prospect that clears the bar is researched individually.
Write
Strategic copywriters review each dossier and write every message.
It starts with you. Before any outreach begins, we work with you to define the exact criteria a prospect must meet to be worth a conversation – not just firmographic basics like sector, size, and geography, but the signals that indicate ideal fit. Ownership structure, founder profile, growth stage, hiring patterns, public commentary, succession indicators. Whatever distinguishes a target you want to meet from one you don’t.
Our AI pipeline then evaluates thousands of potential targets against those criteria, scoring them. Prospects that don’t meet the bar are filtered out at this stage – they never reach the research phase, let alone the outreach phase.
Every prospect that does pass is researched individually. Our strategic copywriters review each dossier before writing, and any prospect whose research surfaces a reason to deprioritise is filtered out by a person before the first messaging goes out.
A qualified response, then, comes from someone who has cleared three checkpoints: your criteria, our research, and our copywriters’ judgement. They match the profile, the message has engaged them, and they’re open to a conversation. Curiosity replies and polite declines don’t count.
We don’t guarantee meeting volumes – market timing, founder readiness, and valuation expectations all sit outside our control, and any agency claiming otherwise is worth a second look. What we guarantee is the rigour of the system above, individually written messages at every touchpoint, full transparency throughout, and a minimum target list size and outreach cadence agreed at the outset.
Full transparency
You see
everyone we contact.
No black boxes, no vague dashboards, no activity metrics that don’t connect to outcomes.
Things acquirers ask before booking the Assessment.
Response rates vary significantly by sector and target profile. A programme reaching independent founder-owners in fragmented sectors – veterinary practices, regional accountancy firms, owner-managed manufacturers – often sees stronger direct response, because owners typically read their own messages and are reachable directly. A programme reaching founders of larger, institutionally-backed businesses, where executive assistants and advisers control access, typically sees lower direct response. Either can lead to highly successful campaigns, but both need different strategies and targets to measure against. We judge that success by the quality of conversations produced and where they lead in your acquisition pipeline, not by raw reply rate.
We work across any sector where deal values justify the depth of individual research and where outreach quality materially affects the outcome – typically founder-owned businesses being targeted by acquirers, holdcos, and buy-and-build platforms. We’ve run programmes across a broad range of industries and sectors including technology, professional services, healthcare, and specialist manufacturing. If individual outreach is the right approach for your strategy, the sector matters less than the calibre of the target list and the messaging.
Pricing is tailored to each engagement and always combines two components: a monthly retainer that covers the research infrastructure, copywriting, and campaign management, and a success-based fee tied to qualified introductions and meetings. We’ll quote based on your specific acquisition criteria.
Flexible to your requirements. Some clients want a weekly written summary of outreach and responses; others want a shared workspace with full visibility on every target, every message, and every reply. We’ll match what works for your team.
Typically you’ll set up a dedicated subdomain – e.g.
outreach.yourcompany.com– that we authenticate properly with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. That keeps the sender identity yours and protects your primary domain’s reputation. We monitor sending reputation continuously – your brand reputation matters as much to us as deliverability.All outreach is approached with the discretion appropriate to off-market deal origination. Messaging is calibrated to avoid signalling intent prematurely, and sending domains and identities are managed to suit the sensitivity of the programme.
Yes. Folklore is ICO-registered (registration number ZC100745) and operates under documented legitimate interest assessments for all direct outreach. Full detail in our privacy notice.
The first step
The fastest way to see how we’d approach your acquisition criteria is to let us apply our process to one of your targets.
Our Partnership Assessment will show you the research, the strategy, and the messaging – before you commit to anything.
Book a Partnership Assessment08 / Get Started