How much time ARE you spending chasing parked cars?
We can't share the specifics of Dan's origination ask, but to say it was narrow would be the understatement of the year. What actually happened was that Fai turned the curve ball around and asked Dan to slightly expand the thesis. Twenty-five minutes later, what looked impossibly narrow on the surface had become a high-quality origination report, and sitting inside it was a genuinely interesting wildcard that sat just outside the original brief. Dan was, let's say, not displeased.
But it got us thinking. Not just about Dan's hard questions, which we enjoy for the record, but about everything that happens before a conversation like that even takes place. The hours spent building a target profile for a company that turned out to be owned by PE since last autumn. The mandate that consumed three weeks of analyst time before someone found the filing that made it moot. The research that was thorough, diligent, and completely wasted.
The industry has a quality problem, and it knows it.
Less than a third of corporate dealmakers rate their own deal flow as high quality. That's not our assessment by the way, that's 728 corporate development professionals rating themselves in a Lion Equity Partners survey.
Twenty-eight percent…
Which means nearly three quarters of the professionals doing this work, every day, don't think what they're looking at is good enough. And the infrastructure isn't helping, more than half of dealmakers are still running their pipeline on spreadsheets. One in ten aren't formally tracking their data at all.
The problem isn't effort, the teams doing this work are experienced, diligent, bright, and under real pressure. The problem is that the information available to them (fragmented, lagged, incomplete) is structurally not fit for the pace at which good origination needs to move.
Fast yes. Fast no. Fast watchlist.
The fast no is as valuable as the fast yes. Time spent confirming a target is dead is time not spent finding a live one, and only about one in five term sheets in the market ultimately close, which means the funnel needs to be working hard and clean from the very first screen.
There's also a third outcome that doesn't get enough attention: the fast watchlist. The company that isn't right today but could be tomorrow. The one you park with intent and enough intelligence loaded that when the moment comes, you're not rebuilding from zero, you have had updates, you know where they stand, right now. You're already positioned.
And then there's what happened with Dan. The out-of-thesis wildcard. The adjacent opportunity that only surfaces when the intelligence is assembled broadly enough to see it, and quickly enough that it appears before your competitors have even started their search.
The targets everyone can see are the targets everyone is pitching. The ones that surface through proprietary signals such as; financial patterns, ownership shifts, strategic inflection points that haven't yet made noise, those are the conversations your competitors aren't having. Because they don't know to have them. That's what Fai was built for.
Not to replace your analysts or their judgment, not to automate the relationship, but to make sure that when you walk into a conversation, or build a mandate, or expand a thesis, you're doing it with the right intelligence, assembled fast enough to actually matter. Twenty-five minutes, in Dan's case.
If the origination piece is where your team feels the friction most, we'd like to show you what it looks like with better intelligence underneath it.