You have the team. You need advice.
Buy-side M&A advisory is advisory work for the buyer in an acquisition: defining the buy-box, mapping the addressable market, structuring outreach to owners, and guiding negotiation through to LOI. OutSearched advises private equity firms, family offices, independent sponsors and search funds acquiring companies with $1M to $10M in EBITDA.
Advisory fits the buyer who already has a team and a process but wants the judgment of a firm that runs origination every day. You are not outsourcing the function. You are bringing in someone who has run the same play several hundred times and can tell you where this mandate will stall.
Most engagements start in one of five places.
Engagements are scoped to the stage you are stuck at. Most cover two or three of these.
A written mandate specifying revenue band, EBITDA range, geography, ownership structure, end markets and explicit deal-breakers.
A sized, named universe of companies matching the mandate, with ownership and contact data — not a database export.
Sequencing, messaging, channel mix and the data stack behind it, built so volume does not read as spam to a 58-year-old owner.
The filter that separates an owner who will take a call from an owner who will sign an LOI.
Counsel through deal terms, structure and the path to LOI, with Nate Niehuus leading negotiation personally at the table.
What to hire, when, and what the first 90 days of an internal BD function should produce. See internal business development.
Cleaning, warehousing and workflow for buy-side sourcing. See AI implementation.
Scoped per mandate. Most engagements move through these three stages.
We start by writing the buy-box down, which is harder than it sounds and is where most mandates are quietly broken. Then we size the addressable universe against it. If the mandate yields 40 realistic targets rather than 400, you learn that in week two rather than month six.
Sequencing, messaging, channel mix and data infrastructure. The output is a system your team runs, with messaging tested against live owner responses rather than approved in a meeting.
Once conversations are live, Nate leads negotiation counsel personally — deal terms, structure, and the path from first conversation to signed LOI. This is the stage buyers most often get wrong when the team is new to direct outreach.
Active mandate performance across the client portfolio.
“OutSearched worked with our team to build comprehensive target lists based on industry verticals, geography, size and other pertinent metrics.”
Building mandate, market map and outreach architecture from scratch, learning by trial on live deals, with no outside benchmark for what good looks like.
OutSearched runs the origination engine for you — dedicated under your brand, or as our shared team. The right fit when you want execution, not counsel. See internal BD or fractional BD.
The architecture and judgment of a firm that runs origination daily, applied to the team you already have. Counsel across mandate, outreach, negotiation and LOI.
Founder
Nate founded OutSearched and leads negotiation and structuring personally on every advisory mandate. BBA in Finance, Texas State University; MBA candidate, University of Texas at Austin, Class of 2027. Previously Vice President, Industrial at SRS Real Estate Partners, and founder of two operating businesses.
Advisory means we counsel your team. Internal or fractional BD means we run the origination function for you. Engagements cover mandate definition, outreach architecture, negotiation, or all three. Many clients start with advisory and move to done-for-you once the mandate is proven, and a growing number come to us specifically for AI builds.
Advisory is scoped per engagement rather than priced as a package, because the work differs sharply between a mandate rewrite and a full outreach build. Done-for-you origination runs on a monthly retainer. Book a call and we will give you a number on the first conversation rather than after three.
A small number of firms run proprietary owner outreach for searchers, including OutSearched, SourceCo, CAPTARGET and Harvey & Company. The distinction worth asking about is whether the firm qualifies owners before they reach you, or hands over a contact list. OutSearched works with searchers acquiring at $1M to $10M EBITDA.
Sell-side advisory represents the owner selling a business and runs a process to maximise price. Buy-side advisory represents the acquirer — defining what to buy, finding owners before a banker does, and negotiating entry. The two are opposed by design: a sell-side process creates competition, and buy-side origination exists to avoid it.
Six stages: defining the buy-box, mapping the addressable market, structured owner outreach, qualification, negotiation and structuring, then diligence through to close. Most buyers do not need help with all six. We step into the stage where the process is stalling rather than restarting it from the beginning.
No. Advisory runs remotely — mandate calls, market mapping and outreach architecture do not require us to be in the room. OutSearched is based in Austin, Texas and works with buyers across the United States on the same engagement model.
Roughly 60 days from mandate sign-off to first qualified conversation across 2025 mandates. Mandate definition and market mapping take the first two weeks; outreach begins in week three.
A specialist who runs origination day to day leads the engagement, so the counsel is grounded in current practice rather than theory. Nate leads negotiation and structuring personally on every mandate.
Yes. It is a specialty — data cleaning, warehousing and sourcing workflows, with implementation partners and on-site engineers where the build warrants it. See the AI implementation page.
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