Every origination model on the market puts your firm's intent in the owner's inbox and hopes good copy hides it. We run it the other way. Siro reaches retiring owners as an independent party, pre-vets every conversation through our own team, and routes each qualified owner to exactly one firm. Mapped to your exact thesis and target box. Your name never on the first touch.
One owner, one firm. If your box overlaps a current client's, we tell you on the call.
Most M&A firms and IB shops live on referrals from their CPA, lawyer, and wealth manager relationships. It built the industry, and it caps every firm in it. Referral flow arrives in swells and droughts no one can forecast or staff against, and the network cannot reach the wave that's coming.
Record supply. Record capital. Falling closed volume. Most of that wave has no banker, no referral chain, no plan. It never enters anyone's funnel.
Firms don't ignore this. They try to fix it, usually one of three ways, and all three break at the same joint.
They'll promise AI and "automated systems," which in practice means uploading your list into ChatGPT and hoping something good comes of it. You've gotten those emails. You know how they read, and it's not the impression a firm handling nine-figure exits wants to make. And even when the copy improves, the positioning doesn't: it's still your firm asking for the meeting, like a used car salesman begging for a demo.
"We tried the whole marketing agency approach before working with you guys, they promised the world but it really didn't change much." — Boutique LMM Investment Bank
Brokered introductions, thinly vetted, and the same owner shopped around the market.
"It's really just guys selling leads. The vetting of the companies is silly. The same lead goes to three firms at the same time." — M&A Firm, NE Region
$120K to $180K loaded, and what you get for it is one channel and whatever volume a single person can carry by hand in a day. Then the first live mandate takes those hours back and sourcing goes dark for the length of the deal. Which is the exact stretch where you needed the next one already moving.
"The hit rate I had was 5% if I was lucky, maybe 3%. Generally, it's a huge time suck for not a lot of reward." — a boutique IB director
Reach was never the broken part. Owners are findable, they do open email, and they will take a call. What sinks all three is that the person asking is the person who gets paid when the answer is yes, and an owner reads that in the first line. And the cost of losing is quantified: when buyers reach owners directly with no advisor in the room, Bain finds deals close 15 to 30 percent below competitive processes, while advisor-run processes command 18 to 25 percent more. Every unrepresented owner in that wave is a mandate somebody never saw.
The gap is not reach. It is that no one credible is asking.
Every model above treats exclusivity as an afterthought, if it shows up at all. We treat it as the mandate. It's the reason a routed owner is worth something to you the moment they land on your calendar, not a maybe.
An owner who responds gets routed to exactly one firm. Not shopped to whoever's paying that week, not warmed up and sold twice. If your box overlaps a mandate we already run, we tell you on the first call and decline the overlap on the spot, before any money moves.
Once an owner is delivered to you, they're suppressed. No further outreach against them, from us or anyone running a similar campaign, for 90 days. The conversation stays yours to run without a second firm's message landing in the same inbox next week.
If an owner we introduced comes back around on their own well after the fact, the attribution holds for 12 months, whether or not you've renewed. An introduction we make stays credited to the term it was made in.
There are two openers every owner in this market has already deleted. One is a version of "have you given any thought to selling." The other is a version of "a buyer of mine is looking in your category." Both announce the sender's interest in the first line, and that's the whole reason neither works. What owners want instead is someone they can trust: someone who helps them understand what their business is worth, how to increase it, and how to craft a succession plan that actually makes sense and respects what they built.
And what you want is the strong posture of a warm referral, without the inconsistency and without the tire kickers. That is where we come in.
An independent first contact. Siro originates conversations through direct outreach under our own name and relevant stealth domains. Your brand and your firm are always protected. We lead with insight: market data, valuation context, and relevant facts matched to the owner's business and your firm's thesis. A natural match, and nothing being sold. The owners who respond do it out of curiosity, on their own terms, which is the entire reason the conversations happen at all.
A named person behind every response. Our targeting reads the signals that matter before we ever reach out: hiring surges, business and owner age, recent news, and the other triggers that say a conversation is worth having. Replies don't land in a shared inbox after that. One person on our side owns your account, works every owner who writes back, and confirms it's a proper fit for your box before anything moves further. Only the ones who clear the bar get booked onto your calendar, and you walk in as the preferred expert, not on your heels. These conversations are never brokered off: one owner routes to one firm, always. Nothing we deliver is shopped, resold, or recycled.
A record, not a rented campaign. The goal across a term is one to two signed mandates, though your MDs still have to close them, not us. We won't put that number in writing, because guaranteeing mandates from origination is guaranteeing something we don't control. What you hold at the end of the term is the record: the map of your universe, the messaging that pulled and the messaging that died, the objections owners actually raised, and the screen we built to sort them. Bring it inside and run it yourself, or leave it with us and we widen the motion around it: LinkedIn presence and outbound, added channels, and the assets that make every future conversation easier to open. Either way, you keep what the term built.
The machinery underneath is the same stack the infrastructure vendors sell: private sending infrastructure, full-universe mapping, signal monitoring. We just never point it at your market wearing your name.
Client identities sit under agreement, so the names are withheld. Nothing else on these cards is adjusted. Sector, timeline, and counts are as recorded, and full mechanics go to anyone who asks on a call.
93 routed introductions produced roughly 23 valuation conversations, 2 signed sell-side mandates, and 7 more owners in pre-mandate discussions. This is the full funnel, end to end: from first independent touch to mandates on paper.
7 serious owners and 3 tracking toward mandates inside the first month of a new engagement. Early-engagement numbers, shown because the first 30 days are the ones every firm asks about.
The same private origination motion, pointed at a different mandate: a medical receivables and funding client whose box was founder-owned personal injury clinics. We originated the conversations independently, pre-vetted every clinic owner for fit, and routed our client in as the preferred funding partner. Different deliverable, identical mechanics: independent first touch, owner-level vetting, one counterparty routed to one firm. What changed is only what the mandate was for.
Rooms opened through our outreach. Counterparties reached and conversations booked through our go-to-market origination engagements, identities redacted. The same engine now runs for sell-side M&A.
Worth saying plainly, since nobody else will: we open the room. Your MDs win the mandate. A vendor telling you outreach produces signed deals on its own is describing a job that outreach does not do. What we show above is what the system produces when the MDs do their part.
No. See the exclusivity terms above: one owner routes to one firm, every delivered introduction is suppressed for 90 days, and the attribution holds for 12 months. It's not a policy line, it's how the routing is built.
Our targeting starts with signals: hiring surges, owner and business age, recent news, the triggers that say a conversation is worth having. Then our team works every reply before anything reaches you: who the owner is, what the business looks like, where they stand on timing, whether they're serious. What clears the bar books onto your calendar. What doesn't stays with us.
Pricing is custom, quoted after we map your reachable universe on the first call, because each engagement is scoped to your thesis and the mandates we have to align with. Two things hold across every engagement: the fee is flat for the term, and clients do better on cost per signed mandate than an in-house BD hire, an agency, or a sales contractor. If they wouldn't, we tell you that instead.
Mandate conversion alone typically returns 2 to 2.5x the engagement fee in front-end work fees, before any transaction closes. A closed transaction moves the return on total spend to a multiple several times that. On the call we run the math against your actual retainer and success-fee structure, so the numbers are yours rather than a hypothetical.
Sized on the call, after we map your box, not before. A vendor quoting volume before seeing your reachable universe is quoting from a template. What holds on every engagement is the standard: every conversation pre-vetted by our team, every owner briefed before the call books. If your box can't sustain a meaningful cadence, you hear that before money moves.
Faster than you're used to. Because we run our own in-house Private IP infrastructure, there's none of the typical two-week warmup and ramp time you eat when you hire an agency. Everything is live within 7 days. First conversations tend to materialize around day 10 to 14, and realistically, first mandates close between day 60 and day 90.
We can dig into your specifics on the call, but nine times out of ten it's a positioning problem, not an outbound problem. Does this sound familiar: hired an agency, took your hands off the wheel, and hoped something worked. Or hired a lead vendor and found out the conversations were being brokered off to three other firms at the same time. That second one is a real story from one of our clients. We've dedicated thousands of hours to perfecting this motion, it's the only thing we do, and the sender is the one variable we run differently at the root: the outreach never comes from the firm that earns the fee.
No. We originate and route conversations for a flat engagement fee. We don't represent either side of a transaction, we don't run processes, and we never sit between you and the owner. Once the introduction is made, the relationship and the mandate are entirely yours.
That's a mapping question, and we answer it before you pay us rather than after. The first call counts the owners your box can actually reach. Niche usually helps: the more specific the thesis, the more relevant the insight in the first touch, and relevance is what owners respond to. If the universe is genuinely too small to run continuously, we tell you that and save you the term.
Not until the moment it should be. Outreach runs under Siro's name, never yours, and your firm enters the picture only when a vetted owner is briefed for your call. Your brand never appears in the cold market, and nothing about the outreach is traceable to your firm.
Firms shopping for a volume number, firms whose target box is too small to run continuously, and firms whose box overlaps one we already represent. Exclusivity means we decline the third category on the spot, and telling you that on a thirty-minute call costs everyone less than telling you on day ninety of a signed term.
A sharp target box, a suppression list, and MDs who take the routed calls within the week and tell us what they heard. Feedback is not a courtesy, it is the input that sharpens the screen. Everything else, infrastructure to reporting, is ours.
| In-house BD hire | Lead vendor | Marketing agency | Outbound infrastructure firm | Siro private origination | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who the owner hears from | Your firm | A broker blast | Your firm, via AI templates | Your firm, via their machine | An independent party |
| How the owner reads it | An ad | An ad, received three times | An ad, and it shows | A better-written ad | A conversation worth having |
| Exclusivity | n/a | Same lead to multiple firms | n/a | Yours, but volume-driven | One owner, one firm, always |
| Vetting before your calendar | Whatever they have time for | Thin to none | None | Booked calls, you qualify | Signal-driven targeting plus team pre-vet |
| Your posture on the first call | Cold | Cold, and late | Cold | Cold, at scale | Preferred expert, owner briefed |
| When live deals get busy | Sourcing stops | Meter keeps running | Meter keeps running | Machine keeps sending | System keeps running, feedback keeps sharpening |
| What you own at the end | An employee's experience | Nothing | Nothing | Sending infrastructure | Your market map, messaging, and screen |
Thirty minutes. You bring the box. We size the universe inside it live on the call, tell you whether it's open under our exclusivity floor, and give you a straight read on what one term produces in your market. If a different model serves you better, we say which one before you've paid us anything.
Request a conversationHandled by the team that would run your mandate.