Campbell Kerr

Hey Campbell — we both ended up in PE from different directions. been thinking a lot about proprietary origination in services / self-storage lately. would be good to connect.

Hey Campbell, we both ended up in PE though from different angles — I came through IB at Greenhill in London, not the operator route like you. 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 Campbell, we both landed in PE though from pretty different paths — I came through banking at CS & Greenhill in London into growth equity, not building and exiting operating companies like you did with Zodiac and now Arborstone. 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, so every deal is virtually sourced from scratch. nothing compounds on itself. curious if that resonates or if you've built something different at Arborstone? — Russ

hey Campbell — no worries if the timing's off. most funds I talk to have tried some version of building origination in-house — analyst pulling from Pitchbook or Grata, maybe using ChatGPT to help qualify, 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 are all disconnected so there's tonnes of wasted energy. been helping a fund like Mentmore work through that exact thing. curious if you've run into the same at Arborstone? — Russ

totally get it if origination infrastructure isn't top of mind right now — especially with the storage expansion moving as fast as it is. 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

Campbell — We've been building custom deal sourcing systems for funds doing acquisition roll-ups in fragmented, operationally-driven sectors — which from what I can tell is pretty close to what Arborstone is doing across Oklahoma and East Texas with self-storage. also, incidentally, we share a somewhat similar background — I spent time in PE doing direct investment into lower mid-market service and industrial businesses before building SearchLoop to solve my own sourcing problem. One of our clients, Backer Group in the UK, uses a system we built to find owner-operated service businesses, score them on acquisition fit and owner readiness, then run personalized outreach across email, LinkedIn, and even physical letters. They're a small team, so the system handles origination end-to-end while they focus on closing and managing the portfolio. Everything hooks into their CRM with live updates so nothing falls through the cracks. for a fund like yours that's acquiring individual storage properties at pace, the mapping and scoring layer could be interesting — we've built geographic sourcing with Google Maps data overlays for another client (Mentmore Capital) that identifies targets in specific regions and scores them before anyone picks up the phone. Given we've already built out this kind of infrastructure for similar roll-up strategies, I wondered if you wanted to take a look under the hood? no worries if you're all covered on the sourcing side. I'm fairly free this week and next, just let me know a time that suits. very best, Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23