Content for Proprietary Deal Flow in the Lower Middle Market

Every private equity firm in the lower middle market says it wants proprietary deal flow, right, and when you ask what that actually means, it usually comes down to one thing, which is being the fund a business owner calls before they ever hire a banker and run a competitive process, because once there is a process with twelve bidders the price goes up, the terms get harder and the relationship starts on a transactional footing, and every fund knows the best deals they ever did were the ones where the owner already trusted them.

The part most funds get wrong is where they look for those owners. They go to the conferences, they call the intermediaries, they buy the databases and they send the cold letters, and all of that has its place, but the owner of a founder-owned business with a few million in earnings is almost never reading private equity trade press, almost never at a PE conference, and very often deeply suspicious of cold outreach from a fund. What that owner is doing, often years before they sell, is quietly searching for answers to questions they do not want to ask anyone yet. I run a content and distribution studio and I also back companies, and I think that quiet search is the single most underused source of proprietary deal flow in the whole market.

What are business owners actually searching for?

The questions an owner types into Google or YouTube late at night are remarkably consistent, and they are almost never the questions a fund's content answers.

They search for what their business might be worth, and how that is even worked out. They search for what happens to their employees when a business is sold, which is often the thing they care about most. They search for whether they should sell to a competitor, a private equity firm or a family member. They search for what private equity actually does after it buys a company, frequently because they have heard horror stories. And they search for how long a sale takes, what they would need to prepare, and whether they can stay involved afterwards. These are the questions of an owner who is two, three or five years away from a decision, which is exactly the owner a fund wants to meet.

A fund that answers those early questions honestly, in plain language, with a real person on camera, becomes one of the names the owner already knows by the time they are ready to talk. That is basically the whole mechanism, and it is slow, and that slowness is exactly why so few funds commit to it and why it works so well for the ones that do.

Why does most fund content miss these owners?

Because it is written for allocators and bankers, in their language, on their platforms.

A fund's typical public content talks about platform acquisitions, add-on strategies, multiple arbitrage and value creation, and that vocabulary means nothing to a sixty year old owner of a regional distribution business who has never dealt with private equity. Worse, some of it confirms their fears, because an owner who reads about "operational efficiencies" hears "layoffs". The content is not wrong, it is simply aimed at a different audience, and the owner scrolls past it or, more likely, never sees it at all, because it is published on the fund's LinkedIn page where their audience is other finance professionals.

Reaching owners means changing three things at once, the language, the topics and the channels. The language has to be plain, the topics have to be the owner's questions rather than the fund's thesis, and the channels have to be where owners actually look, which increasingly means YouTube and Google search, sector specific communities and the networks of the advisers they already trust.

An owner does not choose a fund at the moment they decide to sell. They choose it in the years before, while they are privately working out who they could trust with the thing they built.

What content actually reaches owners?

Honest, plain answers to their real questions, delivered by the people they would actually be dealing with, and organised so that search can find them.

The most effective single format I know is a short video, five to ten minutes, where a partner or an operating partner answers one owner question directly. What happens to my employees if I sell to private equity. How does a fund decide what my business is worth. Can I stay on as CEO. Why would I sell a majority stake instead of the whole thing. Each of those is a real search with real volume, and each one gives the fund a chance to show, in its own words, how it thinks and how it treats people. These videos work best when they are honest about the trade-offs, including when private equity is not the right answer for an owner, because nothing builds trust with a suspicious owner faster than a fund telling them something against its own interest.

The second format is the story of an owner who already sold to the fund, told with their permission, ideally by the owner. A founder describing what the first year after the deal was actually like, what they worried about beforehand and what really happened, is enormously persuasive to another owner facing the same decision. The operating partners are central to this, which is why I think operating partners should be the face of a lot of fund content.

The third is sector specific content, because owners identify with their industry first. A fund focused on industrial services that publishes regularly about the specific challenges of industrial services businesses, succession, labour, pricing, technology, becomes part of that industry's conversation, and owners in that industry find it through the same searches they already make.

How do intermediaries fit into this?

They amplify it, especially the advisers owners already trust, the accountants, lawyers and wealth managers who hear about a sale long before a banker does.

These advisers are asked the same owner questions over and over, and a fund that has published clear, honest answers gives them something useful to share. An accountant who can send a client a short, straightforward video from a fund explaining what private equity actually does after an acquisition is doing their client a favour, and the fund gets an introduction that arrives warm. This is one of the reasons the content has to be genuinely useful rather than promotional, because an adviser will only share something that makes them look good for sharing it.

The more traditional intermediaries, the brokers and bankers, respond to the same content in a different way, because it makes the fund memorable and easy to recommend to owners who care about what happens after the sale. That frequency effect is part of what I describe in what a private equity marketing agency should actually do.

How do you measure proprietary deal flow from content?

Slowly, honestly, and with a simple question added to every first conversation with an owner, which is how they first heard of the fund.

The first year will show early signals, search traffic to the owner question videos, watch time from the regions and sectors the fund cares about, and occasional inbound enquiries from owners who mention a specific video. The real results take longer, because the owner who watched a video three years before they sold will not necessarily say so unless asked. A fund that asks that question consistently and records the answers will, within two or three years, be able to see exactly how much of its direct deal flow started with content, and in my experience that number surprises people. The wider argument for why owned content compounds in a way paid outreach does not is made in lead generation content for PE and VC firms.

Where does the website fit?

It is where every owner goes after watching a video, and it needs to answer their questions as plainly as the video did, which most fund websites do not. A site written entirely for allocators, with fund sizes, target returns and a list of acquisitions, feels cold to an owner who just watched a partner talk warmly about protecting employees. I wrote separately about private equity website content, and the short version is that a page written specifically for business owners, in their language, is one of the highest value pages a lower middle market fund can build.

Why Pixel Samy fits this

Reaching business owners through search and video is the kind of work Pixel Samy Studio does every day, and it maps closely onto how we are built. We are a boutique content and distribution agency whose team of close to 50 works in-house out of Dubai, founder-led, so the partners work with me directly. We run seven YouTube channels of our own, each with over 100,000 subscribers, and my personal channel has over 150,000, so we understand how search driven video actually finds its audience over years rather than weeks, which is exactly the timescale proprietary deal flow runs on. Our editors cut more than 400 podcast episodes a month, so owner stories and partner conversations are routine work, and our YouTube management service is built around building channels that compound. I also build and back companies myself, so I understand how an owner thinks about selling in a way that is hard to fake.

If any part of this would be a first for us, you will hear that from me before you sign anything. For the YouTube side, our sister studio ClickTheory designs the packaging, and its guide on YouTube thumbnails for private equity firms covers how to earn clicks from owners without looking like a finance influencer. The guides to how to get clients with content for PE and VC firms and content marketing for PE and VC firms cover the wider picture.

If you are a lower middle market fund tired of competing in every banker's process, send me a note and I will map the first ten owner questions I would answer for your sector, does that make sense, right. So yeah. That's my way of saying it.