Westonview Partners

Peter had built Westonview on the back of his own calling. It converted well, and it cost him an hour of his day for a handful of conversations. An outside provider was contacting around 250 owners a day and producing roughly one meeting a week, and the quality was inconsistent: a meaningful share of those meetings were with people looking to acquire a business rather than sell one, which is the wrong side of a sell-side mandate.

The deeper problem was his read on the channel itself. Peter heard the same thing from most owners he spoke to, that they were buried in approaches, and he assumed that no amount of volume would ever surface real seller conversations.

He also had a brand to protect. A sale is confidential, so contacting the wrong person at a company risks signaling to staff that the business may be for sale. He was explicit that he would rather have fewer genuinely qualified conversations than a calendar full of loose ones.

Rather than work a narrow list harder, we went the other way and built the whole market: founder-owned and owner-operated businesses across Canada in residential and commercial services, skilled trades, fire and life safety, environmental services, property management, specialty distribution and specialty manufacturing, filtered to the size band where a retainer and success fee make sense. Every contact was owner-verified before anyone was approached, and non-owners were excluded rather than used as a route in, which is what kept the work away from staff.

The approach was built on the signals that suggest an owner might be ready: a long-tenured founder with no visible successor, a direct competitor recently bought by private equity, a management team built out underneath the owner. Every interested owner was called within five minutes, qualified on ownership, size and timing, then introduced. Those who did not come back were passed to Peter’s own caller the following day, so the phone work followed the research rather than duplicating it.

We approached nearly 22,000 owners. 242 were interested in having a conversation, and 38 of those became booked introductions inside six weeks, against the one a week his previous arrangement had been producing.

Just as important for a sell-side mandate, the meetings were with the right people. Owner verification on every record kept the work away from staff, and away from the acquisitive buyers who had been taking up calendar space before.

The reach also addressed the real bottleneck Peter had named at the outset, which is not finding good businesses but catching owners in the short window where they are open to a transaction. Covering the entire market, then returning to it with fresh messaging, is what puts Westonview in front of an owner at the moment that window opens.