So Much Fun: The Buyer of Choice in a Fragmented Industry

And even as I've lived that journey, I have noticed an inclination to get closer and closer to the businesses and be more and more operationally involved. So much so that I even entertained the possibility of going and running something properly again, because I did really enjoy and feel well suited to sitting in that seat.

That's fascinating, Mark. And I think I will make a point of having that be a theme of our conversation because just the, there are a lot of, there's a lot of pain and headaches, to state the obvious, in, in operations. And in fact, you felt those acutely.

We'll get there. We'll. We'll lace it throughout. Very wonderful, wonderful point back to the story. Why were you the world's worst searcher?

Not enough volume and spent far too much time with business owners who are not motivated sellers. So I tell my students that was. Those were my fatal flaws. I.

The amount of time I wasted. Yeah, just like engaging with folks like squinting and an opportunity, thinking that a deal might be had was there's just inexcusable. And then I had this perspective that I needed the outreach to be super high quality, really customized, and that resulted in, I think, above average yield.

But it is fundamentally something of a numbers game and I just wasn't getting enough into the top of the funnel. So to summarize it, one of my favorite people in the whole community, one of my search fund investors, many people listening will know this name. Bill Egan said to me, mark, gosh, I like you a whole lot, but I don't like anything you're working on.

So that is among the reasons that I say that I was the worst ever searcher. Well, it's so Interesting again, Mark, because there's a lot of skepticism around proprietary outreach. First of all, it's way more crowded, obviously than it was back in.

You said 2009. Yes. So the idea that, you know, and we hear that owners are being blasted all the time by searchers and private equity alike. And so personalization is in fact the way you get your edge today in outreach. And, and yeah. So anyway, well, you're familiar with the, the, the acronym varping, right?

So volume at reasonable personalization. Well, I don't know if you're familiar with it. So there's a group of thought leaders who during COVID initiated something called the Surge project.

Some of your listeners may have tuned into these and there was a series of, you know, kind of conversations with practitioners on the subject. And one of the sessions was on this notion of sourcing and the acronym varping was discussed. And again, it is this idea of like volume at reasonable personalization.

Because to your point, you do need to be highly personalized to break through the noise today, but equally you need to get enough volume into the top of your funnel that you give yourself enough looks. And that's a tough balance to strike, in my experience. Yep, yep. Well, before we get off this, I think that actually the more important thing that you said here was about how you were squinting…