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Who we serve — portfolio-company BD & corp dev

For the team inside the platform that actually has to find the add-ons

The sponsor set the add-on target; you own the number.

You know the vertical better than any database vendor ever will, your budget signs off locally, and you cannot wait a quarter for the fund’s data stack to catch up.

This page is for the corp dev lead inside the portfolio company.

15
evidenced signals per target
~1 in 10
keyword matches already owned
€4,900
inside most signing authorities

The view from inside the platform

Portfolio-company BD is a different job than fund BD. You live inside one thesis, your board tracks pipeline by named target, and the clock runs quarterly.

You own the number

The value-creation plan says four add-ons in three years. The person accountable is not an associate rotating off next summer — it is you, the VP of corp dev or the CEO wearing the hat.

Your depth is your edge

You know that an integrator without UL 508A panel-shop capability is a different business, that service territories are drive-time radii, and that OEM authorizations decide whether revenue survives integration.

Shared tools fall short

The sponsor’s database seats return lists your team spends evenings correcting. The vertical knowledge that should be your edge gets spent fixing other people’s taxonomy.

The clock is specific

Every quarter without a signed LOI is a board slide. Every target researched for a week before finding the consolidator’s logo in the footer is unbudgeted capacity. You need sourcing that answers to your board.

Your vertical knowledge, compiled into a screen

You supply the operator’s thesis, we supply the coverage. The sharper your operating criteria, the better the screen performs — portco teams beat fund teams here because their thesis is simply better written.

Full-web starting point

100M+ classified domains across 700+ categories — not an index of companies already found, but the entire active web screened against your thesis exactly as your team writes it.

Two-pass analysis

Triage separates live operators from directories and dead domains. Deep extraction reads 15 structured signals with verbatim quotes and source URLs on every claim.

Thesis-weighted scoring

Mandate Fit 70%, Outreach Suitability 20%, Transition Context 10%. Anything already group-owned is zeroed out — with the ownership language quoted.

Living ICP

When integration experience teaches you a new disqualifier, the ICP updates and the universe re-scores — included, not invoiced.

Evidence pays twice

Your team verifies claims in thirty seconds instead of re-researching. Your board sees “47 scored independents out of 513” — auditable, not anecdotal.

How it runs inside a portco quarter

1

Week 0: thesis in your words

A session with your deal lead and an operator or two. Territories, certifications, service mix, customer types, disqualifiers — the thesis as your integration playbook actually defines it. Same-day specimen first.

2

Weeks 1–3: the vertical, censused

Full-web sweep of your categories: the complete independent universe, ranked and evidenced, plus the consolidation map — who else is buying in your space, documented from their own announcements.

3

Ongoing: radar into your CRM

Structured rows your team works top-down; monthly or quarterly deltas keep it live — ownership changes, new entrants, momentum shifts. Your verdicts feed back into scoring.

4

Board cadence: the numbers

Universe size, worked percentage, pipeline coverage — denominators for the add-on slide that turn sourcing from anecdote into arithmetic.

CRM dedupe at delivery

We diff the universe against your existing CRM export, so the radar arrives as net-new plus corrections — the gap analysis formalizes this if you want the coverage number itself.

Adjacency mapping

When the platform’s next move is a new territory or neighboring service line, the same engine maps it before the first LOI — a censused adjacency is a materially better board conversation.

Signals through an operator’s eyes

The full fifteen-signal framework ships on every row; these five map to how a portco team actually qualifies.

Strategic fit to thesis

Fit against your written thesis — including the operator-grade criteria databases flatten: install-versus-integrate distinctions, self-perform versus subcontract, the customer types your service model can absorb. Supporting sentences quoted per company, so a deal lead can sanity-check ranking without opening forty tabs.

Geographic & branch footprint

Branch locations and stated service areas, owned locations distinguished from partner mentions — the raw material of tuck-in logic. Sort the universe against your density map and the targets that consolidate routes or open adjacent territory rank themselves.

Compliance & regulated-market readiness

The certifications that gate your integration math — UL 508A, ASME stamps, ISO/IEC 17025, EASA, NADCAP — captured as exact claim text. In most portco theses these are pass/fail, and a quoted claim beats a checkbox that someone else’s analyst ticked.

Recurring-offering indicators

Contract, maintenance-program, and consumables language — recurring-offering evidence that determines whether an add-on brings the revenue quality your sponsor underwrote. Screening for it upstream means the pipeline skews toward targets whose QoE will not surprise anyone.

Management professionalization

Named non-founder functions — operations, finance, service management — as a window into integration lift. A twenty-person shop with named ops and service roles integrates differently than one where every road leads to the owner; your hundred-day plan wants to know which it is walking into.

A worked quarter: material handling platform

Concrete texture from our specimen runs in a vertical many platforms know. The material handling census surfaced 513 eligible independent US companies.

Confirmed fits
8 top-scoring targets

Including a conveyor-belt specialist (est. 1980, USDA/FDA-compliant) and a lifting services firm (“founded in the spring of 1979”). Roughly half carry explicit founder or family language.

Keyword-missed
5 invisible to databases

A fifth or more of confirmed fits lack the obvious keywords — targets your competitors’ shared seats cannot surface. In a consolidating vertical, that is proprietary pipeline.

Exclusion log
5 documented + 2 flagged

Each “already group-owned” entry, quoted from the acquirer’s own announcement, is a data point on who is assembling against you and how fast.

The board-runway question

A universe of 513 independents supports a very different multi-year plan than one of 109 — and both are better discovered in month one than assumed until the pipeline thins in year three. More than one platform has redrawn its adjacency sequencing after seeing the counts.

The first ninety days with a radar

Three phases, each building on the last. By quarter-end the question is no longer whether the universe works — it is which adjacency to census next.

Days 1–30Hygiene & calibration

  • CRM diff reconciles the universe against trade-show badges, broker teasers, and inherited spreadsheets
  • First surprise is usually subtraction — names your pipeline carried that the ownership screen disqualifies, with quotes
  • Team works the top decile only; every verdict logged for scoring refinement
  • One or two thesis assumptions prove wrong; the re-run that fixes them is included

Days 30–60Outreach rhythm

  • Weekly outreach block against the ranked list; keyword-missed cohort reply rates typically run ahead of obvious names
  • Board slide updates from anecdote to arithmetic: universe size, worked percentage, conversations opened
  • Gap analysis settles the sponsor tooling debate with a coverage number

Days 60–90Leverage

  • LOI conversations pull deeper diligence; evidence rows already quote certifications, footprints, and named principals
  • First monthly delta arrives and re-ranks something — the moment teams see the difference between a list and a radar
  • Quarter ends with the value-creation question: which adjacency to census next

Budget: sized for a portco signature

Deliberately, this does not price like enterprise software. No fund approval, no procurement committee, no annual commitment.

€4,900

Proof project

Inside most portco signing authorities. Validates the method on your thesis before committing.

€9,900

Full universe + deep shortlist

The standard platform engagement: your complete vertical, evidenced and ranked.

€18,000

Annual monitoring

Keeps the radar live across the hold. ICP re-runs included — integration lessons change the screen, not the invoice.

The full universe costs roughly what one broker-introduced target’s research cycle costs in loaded team hours. Unlike the sponsor’s shared stack, this one answers to your thesis and calendar. If the fund later wants the same engine across platforms, see the fund version. Public pricing →

Straight talk on fit

Works best when your vertical is web-visible B2B and your team can state its thesis in operational language. Works fastest when someone owns the pipeline.

Where it excels
  • Industrial and commercial services, niche manufacturing, distribution
  • Operator-grade theses with certification gates and service-mix exclusions
  • Teams with someone who owns the pipeline and works it weekly
What we will not do
  • No revenue or EBITDA estimates — your team still sizes targets by phone
  • No claims about owners’ intentions — transition context is strictly published fact, carrying only 10% of score
  • No consumer-captive care verticals, per our standards
  • If your vertical is genuinely tiny, we will tell you the census is small before you buy it
What we refuse to sell: no “ready to sell” flags, no revenue or EBITDA guesses, no owner-age profiling, no distress detection — and no engagements in consumer-captive verticals. Read our standards; serious buyers tell us this page is why they trusted the rest.

Questions portco teams ask

That is between you and your board, but the engagement is built so you do not need their tooling: project pricing inside typical portco authority, your thesis, your deliverable, your CRM. Sponsors generally find out because the pipeline slide improved. Where the fund does want visibility, deliverable summaries share cleanly — universe counts and coverage numbers are exactly what value-creation reviews want anyway.

Different customer, different thesis depth. Fund tooling screens broadly across platforms; your engagement screens one vertical at operator depth — your certifications, your territories, your disqualifiers — and starts from the full web rather than a licensed index. The two coexist; the gap analysis will quantify the overlap on your own thesis if the question comes up internally.

That is the design case. The universe arrives ranked, so a two-person team works from the top decile — typically a few dozen companies — while the census below it provides the denominators and the bench. Deltas arrive monthly as a short structured file, not a re-read. Most portco radars are worked by exactly one owner with partial support; what changes is that their hours go into conversations instead of list correction.

Yes — a second thesis is a second universe, and pre-entry censuses are common: the platform maps a neighboring service line or territory before committing, using the count, consolidation rate, and independent population as entry evidence for the board. Pricing is per thesis, so an exploratory adjacency can run at Proof scope first.

It is your engagement deliverable and it travels with whoever owns the engagement — in practice, usually the platform company itself, where it becomes an asset in the data room: a documented, evidenced sourcing system is the kind of thing buyers of the platform pay attention to. Monitoring can transfer or wind down at the next renewal; no lock-in mechanics.

Not yours. Your thesis, scoring configuration, verdict history, and deliverables are confidential to your engagement — nothing is pooled or resold. A competitor could commission its own census of the same public web, as could you of theirs; what it cannot buy is your calibration: the operator-grade criteria and months of logged verdicts that make your radar rank the way it does. In consolidating verticals that calibration gap is real, and it compounds in favor of whoever started working the universe first.

Your vertical, censused — judge it on a specimen first

One email, same day: every company scored and ranked from your world, full signal transcripts, exclusions quoted. Then decide what your quarter needs.

Request the specimen report