Learnings from 382,981 cold calls to off-market business owners

This Week in ETA:

• Searchers: Next week, I’m teaming up with my friend Alex from Rejigg to highlight how searchers can find & bond with off-market business owners. His team made 382,981 cold calls to business owners—and turned them into a pipeline of real, off-market acquisition opportunities. Even better: they’ve tracked what actually works when building relationships with sellers. We’ll talk through 1/ How to source quality off-market deals, 2/ What first conversations with sellers really need to accomplish, and 3/ The kinds of self-funded deals we love backing through our $10.8M fund. You can register here - hope to see you Wednesday.

• Investors: We love investing in businesses that have very little AI disruption risk. One of my best-performing personal investments is a company that distributes motors for fans in chicken coops. No VC-backed startups are going to be “disrupting” that market anytime soon. At the same time, most businesses we review have outdated tech stacks. We see bringing them into the modern age with thoughtful upgrades (including AI tools where appropriate) as a meaningful value creation opportunity and typically not a red flag.

Plus:

• Fall is coming and ETA conferences are picking back up. Here’s a list of the ones on our radar. Let us know if we’ve missed any you’ve found valuable.

• Curious about our investment terms? Check them out! We follow the standard terms for self-funded search and made a video walking through what’s included.

Question:

Hit reply and tell us - We’re seeing AI used across the deal life cycle (analysis and diligence tools, agentic outreach, deal scrapers, and more). If you’re using AI today in your search, what’s working?