From 1.86 million companies to twenty owner conversations

Every searcher has the same problem, just in different shapes. Too few targets is rarely the real bottleneck. The real bottleneck is that the companies that fit are invisible among the ones that do not.

The Dutch register holds 1.86 million companies. Maybe a few thousand of them match your acquisition criteria. And of those few thousand, only a fraction are in a situation right now where a conversation about selling leads anywhere.

Selection is the work

A good sourcing engine is mostly a good filter. First the hard criteria: sector, size, region, year of incorporation, ownership structure. Then the softer signals: how old the company is, who holds the shares, what the website says, how the business is developing.

That filtering is exactly what software is good at and people are bad at sustaining. Not because people cannot do it, but because it is dull, repetitive and endless. Do it by hand and you stop after a hundred companies. A platform does a million and does not get tired.

Twenty conversations

The point of all that data is small and concrete: a handful of conversations per month with owners of companies you would genuinely want to buy. Twenty of those beat a thousand sent emails, quarter after quarter.

Look at it that way and you start measuring differently. Not how many messages went out, but how many owners sat down with you and what came of it. The rest is means, not goal.