Begin Target Outreach Now the heavy lifting begins. First you’ll want to research and obtain target contact information. Don’t bother contacting anyone but the CEO or President (in most smaller companies the owner and CEO/President are one in the same). Sometimes if you can’t reach the CEO, it makes sense to reach down into the organization to enlist someone to help you get the CEO’s attention, but most of the time this isn’t necessary. CEO/owner contact information is most accurate by accessing the databases that we mentioned above, but may also be obtained from a number of lead sources such as Lead411 or Bloomberg Businessweek. Assuming you have contact names, phone numbers, and that you’ve done your company research, you are ready to go. How to Conduct a Successful Acquisition Search 8 This may be a good time to raise this point again. If you are the CEO or CFO of your company and you’re reading this guide, we realize you will have delegated this responsibility, because you’ll never have time to reach out to these targets and do all of the follow-up on your own. If you have a Corporate Development director in your company, he or she may be the perfect person to conduct this outreach. If you don’t have a dedicated corporate development person in your company, who has sufficient time to dedicate to this target outreach, your acquisition campaign will come to a screeching halt. Beyond the significant time commitment required to be successful, please consider that whoever is making this outreach is going to be speaking with CEO/owners of businesses. You don’t want to choose a junior-level person to make these kinds of calls. This is where some professional wisdom and finesse are required to make a strong connection with your target. Another option is to outsource the search work. There is tremendous merit to outsourcing your Strategic Acquisition Search work or in providing an additional resource to your Corporate Development Director to accelerate the process. This is the work that Third Coast Capital performs, day-in and day-out, for our clients. What you get when you hire a firm like Third Coast is a dedicated resource, a consistent approach, professional maturity, and someone with extensive experience in M&A. Food for thought. Let’s assume you have a dedicated Corporate Development person and they are responsible for this initiative. They must be well prepared with call scripts and email scripts to be consistently compelling and interesting. Just like you, these business owners get daily calls from private equity groups and business brokers that are fishing to determine whether a business owner is ready to sell or not. We consistently hear complaints from business owners that they are inundated with these kinds of calls. Having said that, we also consistently make contact with at least 60%-70% of the business owners we call, all thanks to the Strategic Acquisition Search process we are describing. Business owners are intrigued when we call them on behalf of our clients because we are very clear in articulating the strategic rationale for the inquiry which creates immediate credibility with the target. You should have a similar experience if you’re committed to pursuing highly synergistic and strategic targets. At Third Coast Capital we’ve made thousands of target outreach calls and have fine-tuned our own approach over time in order to increase our probability of success. We won’t go into details on what the initial approach should sound like, but you only get one opportunity to make an impression so choose your words wisely.