Services / M&A Advisory
Deal origination services your firm actually owns
Most M&A advisory firms run origination on two engines: the partners’ network and a junior banker grinding manual outreach between deliverables. Both cap out. We install the outbound system that puts your MDs in front of off-market sellers at scale, built in 90 days, owned by your firm when it’s done.
Book a growth audit →Referral deal flow is a ceiling, not a strategy
When roughly 90% of mandates come from the network, new deal flow depends entirely on who happens to call. One M&A advisory firm came to us in exactly that spot: about 90% of business from referrals, a strong quarter whenever the phone rang and a quiet one whenever it didn’t.
The standard fixes each have a familiar failure mode. 3 of them:
→ The junior banker on sourcing duty. Expensive hours, one channel, a few dozen manual touches a day, and origination stops cold the moment a live deal needs the hours back.
→ The deal sourcing companies.Most sell access to the same databases and intermediary networks every other buyer and advisor already pulls from, then put the word proprietary in the deck. An owner worth talking to gets “we have a buyer for your business” emails every week and has stopped reading them.
→ The lead-gen agency.Uploads a spreadsheet, blasts one generic teaser, and blames the market when it flops. If your firm has been burned by one, you’re the rule, not the exception.
None of those fail because outbound doesn’t reach business owners. They fail because a teaser blast is traffic without a system. The email was never the problem. What was missing is the offer and everything that happens after the reply.
Growth Architecture, built for origination
GrowthFlare is a growth partner, not a lead-gen shop, and the distinction is structural. The foundation build runs 90 days for a one-time fee, no retainer during the build, and the whole system belongs to your firm at day 90. On paper that makes this outsourced deal origination. In structure it’s the opposite of what outsourcing usually means, because nothing about it rents: the machine is yours.
An outreach angle a seller will actually answer
Owners who never planned to sell don’t respond to “we have buyers in your space.” We rebuild the angle in an offer workshop, informed by AI analysis of your past mandates, your buyers, and your market, until the first email carries something an owner finds obviously worth a reply. The offer comes first because nothing downstream can compensate for it.
Sending infrastructure that protects the firm’s name
Dedicated domains and inboxes separate from your primary domain, warmed, authenticated, and ramped on a schedule. We run a 60/40 split of Microsoft and Google inboxes across our book, and a mature system reaches around 10,000 emails a day without landing in spam. Your firm’s own domain never takes the risk.
Mandate criteria turned into named owners
A category is a bucket, and you can’t write to a bucket. We build the list around the specific owner your screen can’t see, then layer intent signals on top: hiring, ad spend, social activity. The list keeps rebuilding around companies in motion instead of whoever sat in a database last year.
An assigned SDR working every reply
A dedicated SDR handles every response, qualifies against your mandate criteria, and books sellers directly onto your MDs’ calendars. Pre-call flows mean the owner shows up already knowing who you are, and reminder flows kill no-shows. Everything between interested and signed gets built, because that’s where pipeline quietly leaks.
Yours at day 90
Domains, inboxes, lists, copy, playbooks, and the second brain: a working model loaded with your mandate criteria, buyer profiles, and call transcripts that drafts the outreach and briefs your team before every call. Take it in-house, keep us running it, or keep going as partners. A vendor that wanted you dependent would never hand any of this over.
The sending math behind component 02 is public. We published the per-inbox limits and the ramp schedule in how many cold emails to send per day, and the performance bar the whole system answers to in cold email reply rate benchmarks.
The finance side of our book
About 60% of our client base sits in finance, where we’ve booked 1,000+ demo calls with cold email. Across everything we run, the machine sent 5M+ cold emails in the past 12 months and booked 3,000+ calls in the last year. The rows below stay anonymous (mandates are confidential), but the verticals are exact.
107 booked calls
45 calls in the first 45 days, lead volume nearly tripled, and the largest prospect reached was a $1.5B company. Before the build, roughly 90% of their business came from referrals.
111 qualified opportunities
8+ qualified calls per week at peak and 4 to 6 deals in active pipeline, for a firm whose deal flow previously depended on conferences and referrals.
$1.3m in pipeline opened
127 qualified leads in the first 90 days of the deployment.
$1.6m in pipeline opened
134 qualified leads in the first 90 days.
Roughly 2x their internal team
The system produced about double the results of their in-house origination effort, in the founder’s own accounting.
The honest caveat: these are origination numbers, not closed mandates. A booked call with a qualified off-market seller is the top of your funnel, and your MDs still have to win the engagement. Anyone promising signed deals from cold outreach is selling you something else.
Buyer questions, answered straight
How much do deal origination services cost?
Most of the category prices as a monthly retainer plus a success fee on closed deals, or bills per introduction. We price differently: the foundation build is a one-time fee, there is no retainer during the 90 days, and your firm owns the entire system at day 90. After that you choose what happens next: run it in-house, keep us operating it monthly, or continue as growth partners. We quote the current build fee on the call, not on a pricing page, because it changes.
How long before our MDs are talking to off-market sellers?
The build runs 90 days: cold email goes live in the first 30 days, LinkedIn layers on in days 30 to 60, and calling in days 60 to 90. Seller conversations typically start inside the first month of sending. For scale, one M&A advisory firm booked 45 calls in its first 45 days. We do not promise a number up front, and we would distrust any deal sourcing company that does.
What does our team have to do during the build?
Three things. Show up to the offer workshop so the outreach angle reflects your real mandate criteria. Take the calls the system books. Give us access to call recordings and your CRM so the offer sharpens against what real owners say. We handle everything else: infrastructure, lists, copy, sending, reply handling, and scheduling.
How is this different from M&A deal sourcing services and list vendors?
Deal sourcing companies sell access: a database subscription, an intermediary network, or introductions billed per meeting. The access expires the day you stop paying. We install infrastructure: your firm ends up owning its domains, lists, validated outreach angle, appointment-setting process, and playbooks, producing proprietary seller conversations no other buyer or advisor is sitting in. Access expires. Infrastructure compounds.
Does cold email actually reach business owners?
It is most of what we do. About 60% of our client base sits in finance, where we have booked 1,000+ demo calls with cold email. Owners ignore generic buyer-blast emails because they get them every week. They answer specific, credible outreach about their own situation. And cold email is top of funnel, a door-opener: the offer, the list, and everything between interested and signed decide whether the door leads to a mandate.
Who is this wrong for?
Firms whose target universe is a few hundred companies. Below several thousand reachable targets there is not enough volume to find the winning angle, so the system cannot compound. If that is your market, we will say so on the audit call and save you the build. The qualification is genuine, not a sales tactic.
Map your market before you build anything
Bring your mandate criteria and whatever origination numbers you have. On the audit call we map how many reachable targets your screen actually contains, tell you straight whether that pool is big enough for the system to compound, and walk through what the 90-day build looks like for your firm. If it’s not a fit, you’ll hear that on the call too, for free.
Not an M&A shop? The same architecture runs as lead generation for consultants and lead generation for marketing agencies, and every vertical we cover is on the services index.