The calls are flattering. A partner at a fund you respect wants twenty minutes. They have read about the category. They think your business is interesting. It is easy to take that as a signal that the market sees what you have built.
It is a signal, but not the one it feels like. A fund has billions to deploy on a clock and a small handful of investments a year that clear its bar. The call costs them an analyst’s afternoon. Yours is time you could have spent building your business.
4,500 calls. Three closes.
A mid-market sponsor’s existence depends on volume at the top of a funnel. The business development team, often a dozen or more sourcing professionals, is mandated to call you every ninety days, forever. Your conversation is one row of several thousand. The call was always going to happen. The only question is whether you read it correctly.
Four years, one bid
Founders tell themselves the time is worth it, that the relationship will pay back at exit. Sometimes it does. The problem is knowing which fund, which partner, which thesis. None of those are fixed. Partners leave. Funds close. Strategies rotate. Track a real engagement across several funds and four years and the pattern is hard to miss: dozens of contacts, and at most one bid, arriving lower for every year of talk, not higher.
Every number, kept
Each affable check-in is logged. Your revenue, your projections, your churn. Year over year, the plan you describe is scored against the year you delivered. "Three going to ten" that arrives at four, four years running, never reaches ten, and the buyer has the file. Credibility erodes before you have ever quoted a price. The dossier the buyer keeps on you is more complete than the one you keep on them.
Take the call, on your terms
The answer is not to refuse the call. The answer is to price it. Know what is being collected, know what you are giving up, and decide what you can get in return.
- Before the call, know the fund. Whose money, which vintage, what checks they have written. The name on the calendar tells you whether this is a real conversation or a sourcing rotation.
- On the call, share direction, not the model. Tell the story of the business, not the row-by-row of the projection deck. Specifics become the dataset they score you against. Hold them for a process.
- After the call, log them too. Track who called, what they said, what they asked for. The CRM works both directions. You will see the pattern after the third one.
- Before exit, run the process. The calls accumulated over four years are a contact list, not a buyer list. The buyer list is a structured process, with the next bid as the floor.
Take the calls, and log them. When you decide to sell, the value comes from a process you control, on your timeline, with competitive bids setting the price.