Most conversations about buy-and-build strategies focus on integration. What gets far less airtime is the thing that happens before any of that: how you actually find the right businesses to buy.
Andrew Ofori has spent the last several years fixing exactly that problem. After 11 years at Goldman Sachs co-running a structured lending business across emerging markets, then stints at Standard Chartered and Altica Partners, he built Bloomvine - a dedicated deal sourcing firm that works exclusively on the buy side for PE-backed platforms executing add-on acquisition strategies. When I sat down with him on the RolyPoly podcast, it became clear pretty quickly that most acquirers approach deal sourcing in a way that leaves significant value on the table.
The conversation covered everything from what a deal sourcer actually does (hint: it's not brokerage), to why your criteria at the start of a search are almost never the criteria you end up with, to the very specific ways culture changes how you approach a founder in Stockholm versus one in San Francisco. Here's what stood out.
The Broker vs. Deal Sourcer Distinction (It's Not Just Semantics)
The first thing Andrew pushed back on was the assumption that deal sourcing and brokerage are the same thing. They're not, and understanding the difference explains a lot about why most PE firms struggle to build differentiated deal flow.
A broker is recognizing opportunities, often from the sell side, and presenting that to potentially interested buyers, he told me. Even when a broker works for a buy side, they often have a transaction in mind. We act exclusively for the buy side and we are much more focused on a client coming to us with an idea around how they want to develop their business.
He describes Bloomvine's work as closer to consulting than brokerage. A PE firm comes in with a strategic thesis and Bloomvine's job is to make that real - investigating hypotheses, mapping the full target universe, and building a proprietary funnel of high-probability candidates. They're not matching available buyers and sellers. They're starting from scratch and building the market.
A broker gets paid when a deal closes. A sourcer gets paid to find the right conversations, not to close them. We are very focused on building an efficient funnel that gets to high-probability conversations in a relatively short period, Andrew said. The M&A market is very effectively served. We can add a lot more by focusing on one step before that.
Your Criteria Will Change. That's Not a Failure - It's the Point.
One of the more counterintuitive things Andrew said was about the search criteria themselves. Most platforms approach a sourcer with a clear list: geography, sector, revenue range, EBITDA multiple, growth profile. Those criteria are useful starting points, but Andrew's experience is that they almost never survive the full search intact.
Criteria at the beginning of a study are very, very rarely the criteria at the end of the study, he told me. That's because we incorporate what we learn through the process into search criteria.
The way he describes it, a search is an iterative journey rather than a checklist exercise. As his analysts start building the target universe and reaching out to companies, they learn things about the market that weren't visible from the outside - which sub-sectors are actually fragmented, which geographies have latent supply, which types of businesses are receptive to conversations.
This is also where Bloomvine invests heavily upfront - understanding the client's motivations deeply before building a single list. We spend a lot of time with the acquiring company to understand not just the criteria, but what is it exactly we're trying to achieve and why? What's your history with M&A? What's your infrastructure to execute M&A? he said. For any PE firm handing a criteria sheet to a sourcer and expecting a list in 30 days: this is the part worth rethinking.
Cross-Border M&A Is a Culture Problem, Not a Database Problem
Andrew has lived and worked across five countries and speaks multiple languages. When I pushed him on cross-border deal sourcing, he went somewhere that a lot of deal sourcing content ignores entirely: the approach itself has to change, not just the list.
If it's a highly software-driven company on the west coast of the US, the way you approach them is often through social media, he said. They'll look at your social media presence, your network, whether you're a software person or just a pure intermediary.
Contrast that with a family-owned asset-based leasing company in Sweden that's been operating for decades. Same message, same email template, completely different outcome - probably silence, or worse.
Culture isn't just what country someone comes from, he added. It's what sector you're in, what function the company provides, whether it's software or services or assets. It's a nexus between many different aspects. This is why Bloomvine builds outreach teams from local cultures, often from founders who've operated in those markets.
The Succession Wave Is Real - But Harder Than the Headlines Suggest
There's a lot of content written about the European succession wave - millions of baby boomer business owners approaching retirement with no clear plan. Andrew's ground-level view is more nuanced.
It's way harder to access than it's often presented, he said. The sellers who fit this profile are often not listed anywhere, not talking to brokers, and haven't decided to sell yet.
What stood out most was what these sellers actually care about. Price matters; sometimes it's the only thing. But Andrew has seen plenty of situations where it's not the deciding factor.
The key decision factor for the seller is who will be the best caretaker of my employees, he said. Some of them have been with the owner for decades. They feel they owe them the ability to make sure this is not going to be a very disruptive process. This biases succession-focused sellers toward strategics, because a strategic can credibly promise stability. The case you're making isn't just about valuation. It's about what happens to the people in the building the day after you close.
AI in Deal Sourcing: The Human-in-the-Loop Position Is the Only One That Works
Andrew runs an AI-enabled sourcing operation, so I pushed him on where the technology is actually adding value versus where it's becoming a crutch.
It's transforming us every quarter at this point, he said. The tools have made research faster and more comprehensive. But his most important observation was about what doesn't work.
The suboptimal use of AI is to commoditize your search process so that a given lead is treated exactly the same as every other, he said. Andrew reaches out to some targets up to ten times over three months, but the approach is carefully calibrated to each individual. Volume without customization doesn't work.
Our approach is that everything we do is ultimately leveraging an analyst, he said. We never really remove the person from the process. He also noted that the infrastructure is still evolving so fast that any fixed workflow becomes outdated quickly. Bloomvine builds modular workflows that can incorporate whatever tools are relevant - sometimes their CTO builds custom tools for a single search, other times they use off-the-shelf platforms. That changes every quarter.
The Biggest Mistake: Treating Every Target the Same
I asked Andrew what the single most common mistake he sees in deal sourcing. His answer was unambiguous: commoditizing the approach.
Treating every single potential lead as the same, even within a really specific sector and country, is a mistake in most cases, he said. There are exceptions - HVAC roll-ups needing to hit critical mass quickly, for example. But for anything strategic and complex, generic outreach produces generic results.
About half of Bloomvine's high-potential candidates come not from databases or AI tools, but from analyst research - thinking around the topic, taking an iterative approach to finding names, doing real research on individual companies. Spending real time researching and preparing for this process has a real return in terms of the outcome from an acquisition perspective, Andrew said.
What This Means for Operators Building a Buy-and-Build
If you take one thing from this conversation, it's that the sourcing function deserves the same level of investment and strategic thinking as integration. The deals you get to look at are a direct function of how seriously you treat the process of finding them.
A few specific actions from what Andrew shared:
Start with strategy, not a list. Before building any target database, spend time genuinely understanding why you're acquiring - what capability, geography, or customer set matters most, and why now.
Expect your criteria to evolve. Build a search that's iterative, not just a filter run once against a database. The most valuable information comes from early conversations, not the starting criteria.
Respect the culture of your targets. If you're crossing borders, invest in local infrastructure - people who can approach founders the way a trusted contact would.
Keep humans in the loop. AI can scale the research, but judgment about whether a company is a real fit for your platform is still a human call.
Be persistent, not spammy. If a target doesn't respond, that's not a no. Ten touches over three months, each calibrated, is a relationship. A bulk email blast is noise.
Andrew's broader point about deal sourcing being closer to consulting than brokerage is the reframe I found most useful. If you treat it as a strategic function - with the same investment in methodology, iteration, and judgment that you'd bring to any other part of the build - the quality of the conversations you get to have changes significantly.
