Fritz Blue

Hey Fritz — similar background (IB/finance → PE acquisitions). been thinking a lot about proprietary origination in the small business acquisition space lately. would be good to connect.

Hey Fritz, looks like we share a similar finance-to-acquisitions path, though I was in London at CS & Greenhill not in Dallas buying and scaling small businesses. origination was always the same story for me — clear thesis, decent relationships, but no proprietary system of record tying anything together. every deal virtually sourced from scratch, nothing compounding over time. curious if that's still how most funds operate or if I'm behind the times? — Russ

Hey Fritz, looks like we share a similar finance → acquisitions path, though I was in London doing growth equity deals at Greenhill not in Dallas acquiring and operating small businesses like you. the pattern I keep seeing with most funds is weirdly consistent — strong thesis, solid network, but no proprietary system of record. the people, tools and ideas are never really connected. every deal virtually sourced from scratch, nothing compounds on itself. curious if that resonates or if you've built something different at Vulcanal? — Russ

hey Fritz — no worries if the timing's off. most funds I talk to have tried some version of building origination in-house — analyst pulling from databases, maybe some outreach tools, dumping it into a spreadsheet. each piece kind of works, but there's no system of record tying it together. the people, tools and ideas stay disconnected so there's tonnes of wasted energy. been helping a few funds like Mentmore work through that. curious if you've run into the same thing at Vulcanal? — Russ

totally get it if origination infrastructure isn't top of mind right now — most funds have 10 things ahead of it on the priority list. the funds I've seen crack it early just tend to compound deal flow in a way that's hard to replicate later. if it ever moves up the list, I'm easy to find. — Russ

Fritz — Congrats on taking over as CEO at Wolfram Security Force — saw the announcement and the engagement on it was great. Going from Vulcanal's acquisition strategy to actually running one of the businesses is a move not many people make, and the way you're positioning it (Fortune 500 compliance without the institutional bureaucracy) is sharp. I had a somewhat parallel path — economics undergrad, then banking at Credit Suisse and Greenhill in NYC and London, then deploying €10-30M growth equity tickets in Europe. Loved the investing, hated the manual grind of finding companies. So I built SearchLoop to solve it. Now we build custom deal sourcing systems for acquisition-focused firms. Backer Group in the UK uses it to find service and light manufacturing businesses — map the market, score owner-operated targets on fit criteria → get owner contacts and run personalized outreach → meetings booked directly into their calendar. Mentmore Capital does something similar for HGV hire businesses, using geographic data to map depot locations across the UK. Figured with Vulcanal's focus on acquiring and growing small businesses, and you now running one of those portfolio companies, you've probably seen firsthand how manual the sourcing side can be. Everything we build plugs into a firm's existing CRM, email, and calendar — fully transparent, so you see exactly what's happening at every step. Worth a quick call to see if it could help on the Vulcanal side? Russ searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23