ABridge Keystone Partners

Arthur was working the market himself alongside two outside providers. Between the three of them fewer than 500 new companies were being approached in a week, and the return was two or three live owner conversations. The highest-volume provider produced the least qualified conversations, and none of them was working to a hard target. As Arthur put it, most of them were offering to do their best and see what happened.

For a search that needs to find one willing seller, the arithmetic is unforgiving. The fragmented market of owner-run industrial and field services businesses runs to tens of thousands of companies, and at a few hundred approaches a week it would take years to work through once. Arthur needed to be reaching an order of magnitude more owners without the quality falling away, and he needed someone accountable to a number rather than to best efforts.

We built a complete picture of every US business matching the mandate: B2B, essential, owner-operated, $5m to $75m in revenue, across industrial and field services, skilled trades, testing and inspection, facilities, specialty distribution and the sectors next to them. Lookalike modeling against the nine businesses Arthur had already shortlisted gave us the shape of a good target, and a broader sweep extended the list well past what any single database covers, including the service businesses with almost no online presence at all.

The approach itself was built around succession rather than acquisition, matching the stewardship language Arthur leads with: thirty years in the business, no obvious successor, a recent move to Chairman, a family name still on the trucks. Every owner who came back was called within fifteen minutes, qualified on size, ownership and openness to a conversation, then introduced straight into Arthur’s calendar. He only ever sees a meeting after a person has screened it on the phone.

From the start we approached just over 26,000 business owners. 179 were interested enough to keep talking, and 39 of those became qualified introductions in Arthur’s calendar inside six weeks, arriving at five to ten every week consistently rather than in bursts.

The step change was reach without a drop in quality. ABridge Keystone now reaches more owners in a week than its three previous sources reached in a month combined, and every introduction is screened by a person first. The conversations also gave Arthur a live read on his market: which sectors were most open to a conversation, which owners were genuinely close to retirement, and which parts of the pitch earned a call.