Private equity bought
the company I ran.
So I went looking
for one of my own.

I spent eighteen years in marketing. I worked hard at it, I was good at it, and I helped scale companies in corporate America. That was the plan, and for a long time the plan was working.

Then the company I was Chief Marketing Officer of was acquired by private equity.

Nobody asks you first. That’s the part that stays with you. You can do everything right for years and still find out that the decisions about your work — and by extension your life — get made in a room you are not in.

I came out of it with one conclusion: the only way to have real control over your life is to own the business yourself.

So I went looking

And I ran straight into the thing everybody in this world runs into. Finding a business for sale is one problem. Finding a good one is a completely different problem, and it’s the one nobody warns you about.

There are around three hundred websites where small businesses get listed. I was checking four of them every morning before work, with coffee, a folder of bookmarks and a spreadsheet, and a real sense that I was being thorough.

I wasn’t. And it wasn’t for lack of effort — effort was never my problem. The search just demands a level of organization that a person with a job cannot sustain. You have to watch hundreds of sources. Remember which broker you emailed three weeks ago and never heard back from. Read every listing closely enough to know which ones are worth a weekend and which ones are a waste of one. Let any single part of that slip and the whole thing quietly stops working, and you don’t notice for a month.

That’s the loss nobody talks about. Not getting outbid — you can learn something from getting outbid. Losing one you never knew existed. Somewhere in a Tuesday I never saw, a business went up for sale that was the right size, the right industry, close enough to drive to. Somebody else got there. I’ll never know which one it was.

There had to be a better way

So I built one. Not as a product — as the thing I needed to run my own search. Something that watched the sources I couldn’t keep up with, kept every conversation straight, and told me when something worth my weekend actually showed up.

Then I found out I wasn’t the only one. Everybody I talked to in the acquisition community was fighting the same disorganized search with the same bookmarks and the same spreadsheet. When I showed them what I’d built, enough of them asked to use it that I stopped treating it as a personal tool.

That’s what DealStratum is. The search I couldn’t run by hand, handed to everybody else trying to run it.

What I care about most

The half I’m proudest of isn’t the listings. Plenty of the best businesses never get listed at all — the owner is sixty-one, tired, has nobody taking it over, and would sell to the first serious person who asked. Nobody asks, because nobody knows they’re there.

A fund solves that by paying a team to go find them. You shouldn’t need a team. That is a solvable problem, and solving it is the whole reason this exists.