Lower Mid-Market Search — Deals $1M–$5M

Best fit

Who Lower Mid-Market is built for.

Lower Mid-Market is our most common engagement, built for deals from $1M to $5M in enterprise value — the range where SBA financing maxes out. Most targets at this size are founder-operated, partner-stage, or older. Those owners ignore email by reflex and read every envelope their assistant brings them.

They're also being approached by other buyers. Strategic acquirers. PE platforms running add-on programs. Independent sponsors with similar theses. The question isn't whether they've heard of you when they're ready to sell. It's whether they want to sell to you.

Common fits are independent sponsors, family offices building a multi-year acquisition cadence, holding companies, and any buyer competing for the same owners big PE is also chasing.

Why this works

How a non-institutional buyer wins the deal.

In any vertical with active PE consolidation, the owner you want is being approached by three or four institutional buyers running the same playbook. Same templated email. Same merge-field LinkedIn note. Same junior sourcing analyst on the first call.

Founders notice. They built something they care about, and they pay attention to who's asking about it. A handwritten envelope on the desk reads differently than another email that gets archived. So does the conversation that follows when it starts with a real person who did real research instead of a script.

The PE firms that source the bulk of their deals proprietarily built their pipelines this way. Handwritten letters, plant visits, multi-year follow-ups. Conversations that close years after they start. It's the patient approach that wins on relationship instead of on bid.

Lower Mid-Market gives you that channel. Handwritten outreach to your top priority owners, paired with the digital sequence to the rest. The buyer who shows up like a person, not a firm.

Inside the engagement

What's included.

01 · Foundation

Everything in Main Street

Cold email outbound across 5+ warmed mailboxes, plus the right-list research and multichannel cadence that defines the methodology. Same base layer Main Street runs on — widened to a broader industry and multi-region scope to cover the larger $1M–$5M deal range.

02 · The added reach

LinkedIn + handwritten mail to your top priority owners

LinkedIn outreach via Sales Navigator paired with hand-addressed letters sent USPS. Real ink, real envelopes, with a short personalized note referencing why this specific owner could fit your specific mandate. Older founders, partner-stage owners, and trades operators ignore email entirely but read every piece of mail their assistant brings them.

03 · Diligence-ready

Due-Diligence Prep Packet included

Every qualified owner conversation lands in your inbox with a Due-Diligence Prep Packet attached: financial summary, owner motivation notes, ownership structure, operational red flags, and the fit-assessment from the M&A operator who took the call. Built so you can hand it straight to your lender or investment committee without doing the analyst work yourself.

04 · Cadence

5+ touches across 3 channels

Cold email, LinkedIn, and handwritten mail in a coordinated sequence. Each channel reinforces the others — an owner who sees your name in three places at once is far more likely to take a call than one who saw it in only one. The physical artifact also signals seriousness and longer time horizon.

05 · Targeting

Tighter cadence on top-tier targets

Your highest-priority owners get a denser sequence: more touches, shorter gaps, and the handwritten layer to break through. We escalate cadence based on engagement signals and your input on which segments matter most.

06 · Certainty

2–4 vetted opportunities a month

The outcome you're buying is certainty: every owner who reaches you has been screened by an M&A operator with preliminary diligence already started, so you're evaluating real opportunities that fit your buy box. The coverage we commit to is spelled out in your Search Engagement Agreement.

How we put it in writing →

Why handwritten mail?

A real handwritten note in real envelope ink, sent USPS, is one of the only channels an owner can't filter or delete. We use handwritten mail to reach the segment of your buy box that doesn't respond to digital outreach, and to give priority targets a tangible artifact that signals seriousness. It's the single highest-lift addition you can make to a digital sequence in this segment.

How it runs

One month to ramp. Six to run.

A standard Lower Mid-Market engagement runs seven months total. The first month builds the buy box and warms the channels. The next six are the search itself, with handwritten mail timed to land alongside the digital sequence.

Month 1

Ramp

Buy box construction, contact validation, sender warmup, handwritten-mail vendor coordination, kickoff with your team.

Months 2–3

Launch

Email + LinkedIn waves go out. First batch of handwritten mail to top-priority segment. Phone screens begin on replies.

Months 4–5

Cultivate

Follow-up sequences across all four channels. Second handwritten wave to priority owners. Qualified introductions land.

Months 6–7

Sustain

Continued cultivation of warm-but-not-ready owners. Monthly coverage report. Quarterly criteria check-in.

Other engagement options

When your deal sits outside $1M–$5M.

Lower Mid-Market fits most buy-side mandates from $1M to $5M. If your deals run under $1M in enterprise value, Main Street is sized to pencil at that scale. If you're chasing deals from $5M to $50M, Mid-Market's full channel stack and national scope is the right step up.

Step down to

Main Street

For acquisitions under $1M in enterprise value. Personalized email scoped to a compact buy box, with economics sized to pencil on smaller deals where every dollar of fee has to earn its keep.

See Main Street →

Step up to

Mid-Market

For deals from $5M to $50M. Adds phone outreach and Meta ad campaigns on top of full-buy-box handwritten mail, with national scope — built for the owners who are hardest to reach and most heavily courted.

See Mid-Market →

Lower Mid-Market.