Thomas P. Salice

Thomas - saw SFW's focus on founder-owned industrial businesses. Different path from my CS tech M&A days, but similar challenge: finding companies that aren't shopping themselves. Worth connecting.

Quick thought on industrial deal sourcing: PitchBook shows you last year's revenue. But for a founder-owned instrumentation business, what actually matters is pricing model, customer switching costs, implementation timelines. One tells you what happened. The other tells you what's happening. Expensive databases are great for finding companies, terrible at evaluating them.

Thomas, Noticed SFW's unique focus on industrial instrumentation and life sciences tools - quite different from the typical software-heavy PE world. Though I was at Credit Suisse doing tech M&A, not industrials like you might have covered. I'm sure you get emails like this all the time, but hopefully this one is a little different. At least because it is not ai. In a previous life I was deploying €30m growth tickets into European companies, now I've been building custom deal sourcing systems for funds with specialized mandates. Working with firms like Axiom Equity UK (£60m+ tickets) and Noble Rock here in the US. They needed to map entire verticals & find founders who weren't actively marketing themselves. Figured I'd reach out because SFW came up as interesting given your focus on founder/family-owned industrial businesses that probably aren't showing up in traditional deal flow channels. It's not fancy, but it's powerful because we build it custom to you - maps your exact sectors, scores companies on your criteria, gets founder/owner contacts & handles the whole outreach stream to book meetings. We could deliver 30+ profitable industrial/life sciences companies monthly with $10-75M revenue, complete with ownership details ready for discussions. Worth a quick call to see if it fits? Very best, Russ searchloop.ai www.linkedin.com/in/russellt23

Thomas, Most PE associates spend 80% of their time on work that's 95% automatable. The workflow: Export companies from a database → Open each website → Copy information → Score against criteria → Hunt for owner contacts → Draft outreach → Track everything in Excel. That's a $200K-$300K employee doing $25/hour data entry. For a fund like SFW hunting founder-owned industrial businesses, this matters more. Those companies aren't in deal processes. The associate can't just pull a CIM. They're actually evaluating - or they should be. The question isn't whether to automate the grunt work. It's whether your team evaluates deals or hunts for email addresses. Same analysis. Just 25x faster. Russ

Thomas, PitchBook shows last year's revenue and employee count for that life sciences tools company. What it doesn't show: Whether they sell on value or price. If customers face 6-month implementations. Whether their product sits inside a compliance workflow. The actual switching costs. For SFW's thesis - founder-owned industrial businesses - this gap matters more than for software PE. Industrial companies don't broadcast ARR metrics and retention rates. Their value drivers are buried in how they describe customer benefits and implementation requirements on a website. Databases track what happened. Website analysis reveals what's happening. We built automation that reads websites like a senior associate evaluates deals, just 1000x faster. Pulls out pricing models, customer benefit claims, switching costs, compliance depth. Not a database play. Actually different. Russ

Thomas, There's a structural problem in how PE funds find founder-owned businesses. Associates spend weeks manually mapping sectors, hunting for owner contacts, tracking outreach in spreadsheets. By the time they've covered 100 companies, the market has moved. The companies SFW wants - profitable industrials not running processes - don't solve this by showing up in your inbox. They get found by whoever maps the vertical first and actually reaches the founder. Speed matters. But speed with $200K employees doing data entry doesn't scale. We automated the hunting part so associates can focus on the evaluation part. Same rigor, different velocity. Maybe this isn't the year for it. But the problem doesn't go away. Russ

Thomas, Timing might not be right. Core problem we solve: PE associates doing $25/hour data entry instead of evaluating deals. If that changes, you know where to find me. Russ