The List Nobody Scores
Ask a partner where their deal flow comes from. You'll get four or five names, quickly and confidently.
Now open the inbox. Teasers from boutiques, corporate finance houses, sector specialists, lawyers, accountants, two former colleagues and a debt adviser who thinks he knows what you buy.
Dozens of sources. A handful you can actually rank.
Every other part of the firm carries numbers. Returns by vintage. Cost by deal. Time to close. Origination runs on memory and goodwill.
What Relationship Time Actually Buys
Partners spend real hours on this. Coffees, calls, conferences, the dinner circuit. It is some of the most expensive time in the firm.
It is also allocated almost at random. The people who get the most attention are the ones who ask for it most often, or who are pleasant company, or who sent something good once in 2022.
That is not an origination strategy. It is a social calendar with a P&L attached.
Meanwhile the adviser who has quietly sent you three assets that fit your mandate exactly gets a reply in four days and no lunch.
The Six Numbers
You don't need a system. You need one table, updated quarterly.
Per source, track:
- Opportunities sent. Raw volume. Useful only as a denominator.
- Passed first screen. The real signal. It measures whether they understand your mandate.
- Reached IC. Serious deal flow.
- Completed. Rare. Do not judge on this alone or you'll drop everyone.
- Median time you took to respond. Your number, not theirs. It matters (see below).
- Fit note. One line. What this source is actually good for.
Two quarters of data will change how you allocate relationship time. You will find sources sending forty teasers a year with a zero screen-pass rate. You will find a name nobody thinks about with the best hit rate on the list.
One is costing you review hours. The other is under-invested.
They Are Scoring You Too
This is the part firms miss.
Advisers run their own ranking. Who reads the teaser. Who comes back in three days rather than three weeks. Who gives a real reason for passing instead of going quiet.
When a genuinely good asset comes to market, it goes to that list first. Being slow doesn't just annoy people. It moves you down the queue for the deals you would most want to see.
So a fast, specific "no" is not a courtesy. It is origination. It costs you twenty minutes and it buys you first look next time.
Brief Them Properly
Most advisers are guessing at your mandate because nobody has ever told them precisely.
Write one page. Sector, size, cheque, structure, what you will not do, and two examples of assets you looked hard at and why. Send it to your top fifteen sources.
The volume of teasers drops. The quality rises. Your screening hours fall with it.
Do This Week
Pull the last twelve months of inbound. Build the table. It's a morning's work for an analyst and it will be the most commercially useful page in the firm.
Then rank your sources and reallocate partner time accordingly. Top ten get real attention. The rest get a fast, honest response and nothing more.
You measure everything you spend money on. Start measuring where the deals come from.