Practice
M&A & Acquisition Sprints
Off-market deal flow is manufacturable. Every buyer who waits for a broker to call is bidding in an auction that was priced before they arrived.
All capabilitiesOur approach
Our perspective.
Buy-side sprints run under mandate: qualified owner conversations manufactured on machinery built by the practice that grew out of a national brokerage group, with a person in front of every message.
Proprietary deal flow is an engineering artifact: criteria in, qualified owner conversations out, precision compounding with every cycle. The sprint ships lists, outreach, and pipeline every week it runs: either the machine reaches owners the network never met, or it does not.
The practice stands on a real transaction lineage: Legacy Business Brokers, the national brokerage group Zackary Thornberg built and leads, through which more than $60M in transaction value has closed across its network of more than 30 broker offices. That lineage is why the sprint does not stop at the first conversation.
A retiring owner decides on more than the multiple: successor, employees, taxes. The buyer prepared for all three wins deals the auction never sees.
And what a deal is worth is decided by the structure that finances it. An add-back survives diligence only as well as its documentation, and a file that cannot support the debt cannot support the price. The sprint underwrites on the record, not the deck.
Common challenges
The challenges we help address.
Auction-only sourcing
A brokered process exists to make buyers compete. By construction, the winner has paid more than every other qualified buyer thought the business was worth. The winner’s prize is paying the most.
The intern-with-a-list motion
Un-enriched lists worked by junior effort produce owner outreach that reads as spam, burning credibility in markets that talk to each other.
The peg set at the closing table
A working-capital target negotiated after the LOI, off a trailing-twelve average nobody normalized for seasonality, quietly hands part of the purchase price back to the seller. The peg is not a closing detail; it is price, negotiated at the moment of least leverage.
How we work
How the engagement runs.
- Step 1
Diagnose
Name the honest constraint first: capital, conviction, or flow. Acquisition criteria and deal-box economics follow from which one is actually binding.
- Step 2
Architect
Design the sourcing system to the mandate: universe construction, enrichment depth, outreach register, pipeline stages.
- Step 3
Build
Assemble the machine: sourcing, enrichment, drafting, mandate documents. Point it at the market under the client’s name, behind the client’s gates.
- Step 4
Operate
Run the cadence: weekly pipeline review, reply triage, criteria sharpened by what the market says back. When a target goes live, the sprint carries the deal: the seller note or earnout that bridges a price gap, the working-capital peg set before the closing table, the diligence list worked before it arrives.
Deliverables
What the work produces.
- Acquisition target matrix
- Decide where sourcing effort concentrates, and why.
- Buyer mandate package
- Decide how the mandate presents to owners and intermediaries.
- Underwriting model
- Decide what a deal is worth at the structure you can actually finance — the price is downstream of the debt, not the multiple.
- Sourcing pipeline system
- Decide from a living pipeline, not a static list.
Evidence
From the case studies.
Related insights
The thinking behind the practice.
Get started