We are back with a quarterly update on my learning in the third quarter of searching. After positive feedback from First quarter lessons and Second quarter lessons, I will continue to share these with you until I acquire a business. For those new to Maverick, these are real lessons I share in my quarterly investor updates but elaborate on them in the post. Each lesson within each one could have a separate post, so I will do my best to remain brief. If you have any questions or would like to dive deeper, please comment below.
Stay positive, trust in the process, and keep refining
In the third quarter, I broke off an LOI that we submitted in a proprietary-turned-brokered deal on a business we had been monitoring for a few months. Despite some exciting tailwinds in the business’s end-market, I could not get comfortable with the lack of proven performance on the company’s new product categories, limited SAM, and customer concentration at the proposed price.
Coming off of the broken deal, it was one of the first times in the search that I began doubting myself. Despite having a repeatable, scalable process to source leads, it seemed that every conversation led to huge valuation gaps or the owner doubting my capabilities. One owner, in particular, found joy in asserting, “You are not an entrepreneur! You haven’t built anything like me!” Spoiler alert: That conversation didn’t last long.
With what felt like setback after setback, the first cracks in my armor began to show. As such, I decided to slow down for a few days and take the time needed to reset. After some brainstorming, a few workouts, and a bit of rest, I regained my footing, and my positivity quickly returned.
Sometimes that is all it takes – a few days of reflection and rest, and in this case, taking two steps back before taking three forward. I recognized I had built out well-established processes but needed to refresh and refine these to reflect where I was in the search journey. As I closed Q3, it was time to take action on where I was falling short to succeed in the new year and next quarter.
Nothing is ever as good or bad as it seems.
Review outreach campaign data more closely to improve internal processes and sourcing efficiency
One area that saw significant improvement was in reviewing my outreach campaign data more systematically. Previously I had built a dashboard with my high-level metrics that gave me a sense of the number of companies we had input into our campaigns, but we had yet to look closely at performance besides the simple statistics shown on my sequencing tool, Reply.io.
In the third quarter, I built a series of new tables and visualizations to monitor intern sourcing output, weekly email outreach, total replies, and interested ones in a quick way. This work requires a deep-dive post in its own right, but it all began when I joined my email performance data with our fund’s CRM data into one clean, structured table. Now, with a simple data dump from my sequencing tool, I review campaign performance at a much more granular level than before. Here are some of the charts that have helped me:
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