Investment bankingBoutique sell-side M&A
How a sell-side banker found nine buyers that were on no list
Adjacent strategics and family-owned groups, found by who runs their deals rather than by sector code.
Names, companies, sectors and figures are anonymised. This study describes the workflow and the persona rather than the customer.
01Situation
The mandate was a specialty chemicals distributor. The buyer list assembled the usual way had forty strategics and twenty-five sponsors on it — the same names that see every process in the sector, and price accordingly.
The value in a sell-side list is the non-obvious name: the adjacent strategic, the family-owned group that has quietly done three bolt-ons and appears in no league table. Finding those had meant an associate working through industry directories for the better part of two weeks, and the output was a list of companies, not a list of people who could actually take the call.
02Search
Find heads of corporate development and M&A at specialty chemicals and industrial distribution groups in Europe and North America with revenue over $200M, who have completed at least one bolt-on acquisition in the last three years.
Must have
- A title that carries deal authority, not sector strategy
- A company in the vertical or credibly adjacent to it
- A completed acquisition within thirty-six months
Ruled out
- Financial sponsors already in the process
- Companies below the revenue threshold
- Advisors and intermediaries
Intended actionA teaser-stage approach under NDA, sent from the banker's own address, in two tranches so the first replies could shape the second.
03Evidence
Why they fit
- The person owns transactions rather than sitting adjacent to them — corp dev, not corporate strategy.
- An adjacent vertical the original list had no reason to include, but where the same distribution economics apply.
Verified
- Role and tenure, against the company's own disclosure
- The acquisition itself, from an announcement rather than a database entry
Still uncertain
- Present appetite. A completed deal three years ago says capability, not intent.
- Balance-sheet capacity — outside anything a public source would settle.
- Whether the corp dev lead or the CEO would be the real decision-maker at four of the family-owned groups.
04Action
- Thirty-four contacts, with the nine adjacent names flagged separately so the client could decide whether to widen the process.
- Twelve held back pending the client's view on approaching a competitor's customer.
05Outcome
Four NDAs signed. Two of them were companies that did not appear on the original buyer list at all.
- Buyers identified
- 34
- Not on the original list
- 9
- NDAs signed
- 4
Elapsed6 days from prompt to first teaser out
Net newTwo of the four NDAs came from the nine names that were new to the process.