Source Talks is a series where we discuss deal origination with PE and M&A pros, in collaboration with David M. Toll of Private Equity Career News.
In the latest installment we speak with Will Pacheco, Founder & CEO of Greenfield Research Partners about the firm’s commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technology, deep industry expertise, and unparalleled data insights to revolutionize the buy-side advisory space.
Will, tell us about Greenfield Research and the kind of work that you do there for private equity firms
At Greenfield, our mission is to really revolutionize the buy-side advisory space by leveraging what we feel to be our cutting-edge technology, deep industry and process expertise and really unparalleled data insights. And the end goal of this whole thing is to really empower our clients to go out and find sole-source acquisitions. We specialize in consolidating industries. And ultimately, it’s about driving outsized returns for our clients. Greenfield research has been initially a passion project for me that morphed into a real business. The premise of Greenfield for me really has come from the experience I’ve had as a private equity investor and an investment banker. I just felt there was a better way to use data. So many firms out there would just basically produce the same list and the same subscription databases, which is fine if you’re going after sort of a broad-based thesis, say vertical software companies over $20 million of ARR. But if you’re doing a very specific thesis that involves add-ons, you need to have a specialized data source.
So, at Greenfield, what I did to solve that was I basically went out and found a data scientist and found unique databases to scrape that would produce a very customized list. And I felt historically that many firms overemphasized email and didn’t use technology enough to augment their email processes. And then as a result, spent a lot of their hours writing customized emails and didn’t spend enough time on the phone, building voice connections with founders of companies. So, at Greenfield, we’ve built our own proprietary software which sits on top of Anthropic’s Claude LLM. It enables us to automate large parts of the research and email composition process. And then with all that extra time, we’ve doubled down on what I like to call voice connection. I’ve gone out and hired folks who have 10, 15 years of experience doing cold calling and they’re really relationship experts. And they go out and they build relationships with founders and CEOs of companies and its sort of flipped the usual model on its head. As opposed to hiring young folks out of college to cold call, where the calls they’re making for me are some of the first they’re going to make in their career. I want folks who’ve been doing this for 10, 15 years who are absolute experts in it.
Tell us a little bit more about the role that technology plays in your firm there.
Technology is sort of the foundational pillar that Greenville was built on. We tend to do all the stuff in-house. We don’t view outside data providers that I’ve seen as hugely additive. I’m not saying this because they’re a sponsor, but I have used SPS. The level of intelligence that SPS provides is unique. And I say that having gone out and found all the ways I could find companies via API calls to different databases and hiring a data scientist. You cannot get that level of intelligence on investment bankers that SPS has in any other database.
