How WAD Capital Sources SME Acquisitions: The Deal Sourcing Strategy Behind the CEO-in-Residence Programme

WAD Capital sources SME acquisition targets through Generative DealFlow™, a proprietary methodology combining data analytics, automated screening, and network-driven identification. The Deal Intelligence Platform contains over 60,000 pre-screened companies, giving each CEO-in-Residence (CIR) a structured target universe from day one of the programme rather than months into a solo search. Sourcing is 99% proprietary — no broker mandates, no auction processes — which is how all four completed acquisitions entered below 5x EBITDA. The 12-step acquisition programme structures sourcing into defined phases: Step 1 produces an approved investment memo in weeks one through four; Step 2 maps 500 target companies per subsector within 300 kilometres of Brussels by week six; Step 3 launches outreach by week nine. According to the 2024 Stanford GSB Search Fund Study, a traditional solo searcher takes a median of 20 months to close. CIRs working within WAD's infrastructure close in 9 to 15 months.

What Is Generative DealFlow™ and How Does It Work in Practice?

Most search fund candidates spend the first months of their search building what WAD built before they joined. A CRM adapted from a generic sales pipeline. An outreach sequence written from scratch. A list of 200 companies identified manually by crawling company registries and LinkedIn. This is not a character flaw. Nobody hands you the playbook.

Generative DealFlow™ is the playbook.

At its core, it is a deal sourcing engine that runs continuously across the target market combining proprietary data analytics, automated screening against WAD's investment criteria, and active network intelligence from the GP team and existing CIR cohort. When a new CIR joins, they are not starting a search. They are inheriting a live, filtered pipeline that has been running since before their first day.

The platform does not work like a sales pipeline retrofitted for M&A. Financial profiles, succession signals, ownership structures, and sector classification are built into the architecture.. Manual research that would take a solo searcher weeks compresses to focused analytical hours.

What Does the Sourcing Process Look Like Week by Week?

The 12-step acquisition programme structures the search into two phases: from investment thesis to letter of intent (Phase 1), and from letter of intent to close (Phase 2). Deal sourcing is concentrated in Steps 1 through 6.

Step 1 runs across weeks one through four. The CIR develops a detailed investment memo covering their target sector: market data, competitive dynamics, growth drivers, and the specific operational thesis that makes them the right operator for this type of business. The memo is not a formality. It requires a minimum of five industry expert interviews before week three and five external due diligence reference calls before submission. Investment partners review and approve it before the CIR moves to Step 2. A CIR who cannot write a convincing sector thesis in four weeks is not ready to evaluate 500 companies in the next two.

Step 2 runs from week four through week six. The target: identify 500 companies per subsector within 300 kilometres of Brussels. These are not cold names from a database. They are prioritised by investment size, strategic alignment, and what the platform calls likelihood to sell — proxies for founder age, business maturity, revenue concentration, and succession readiness. The KPI for Step 2 is a minimum of 250 target companies within the fund's investment scope mapped and categorised before outreach begins.

Step 3 launches outreach in weeks seven through nine. Automated campaigns are blended with direct network introductions and personalised cold outreach. Belgian SME owners do not respond to institutional acquisition language. The outreach is designed to open a conversation, not announce a transaction. A response rate below 10% triggers a reiteration of Steps 2 and 4 before progressing — there is a formal checkpoint built into the process precisely because the instinct to keep pushing a thin pipeline forward is one of the most common and costly errors a solo searcher makes.

Steps 4 and 5 cover initial and follow-on meetings across 60 days. The KPI for Step 4 is the percentage of meetings resulting in a positive follow-up. Step 5 targets a minimum of 40 follow-up meetings with founders willing to discuss terms. Step 6 closes Phase 1: securing the first letter of intent. The programme targets three LOIs per month at this stage, knowing that most will not progress to Phase 2.

Why Does Off-Market Sourcing Produce Lower Entry Multiples?

The pricing arithmetic is straightforward. A business that reaches a broker has already been positioned for sale. The broker's mandate is to generate competitive tension. Multiple buyers in a structured process drive valuation up. The seller enters the process knowing they have options.

An off-market approach reaches the founder before that dynamic exists. The CIR is often the first serious buyer the founder has spoken to. There is no competitive tension because there is no competing process. The conversation is about fit and continuity rather than price maximisation. Entry multiples below 5x EBITDA are the structural outcome of sourcing before the market does.

With 99% proprietary deal flow sourced through Generative DealFlow™, all four WAD acquisitions entered at sub-5x EBITDA. The most recent letter of intent was signed below 4x. These figures hold not because WAD negotiates harder than other buyers, but because the firm is having conversations in a different part of the timeline.

Steven Bourgeois built his investment thesis around physical security compliance before identifying Alsec SA in Nivelles as his platform acquisition. Fire safety and security regulation in Belgium creates predictable structural demand for consolidators: operators need to meet tightening compliance standards they cannot satisfy alone, which makes acquisition by a better-resourced platform a rational outcome rather than a distressed one. That thesis drove his sourcing filter. By the time Steven was in the room with Alsec's founders, he understood their sector better than most buyers who might have appeared after a broker mandate.OmniSecur closed in November 2025.

How Does the Cohort Model Change the Deal Sourcing Timeline?

A solo searcher in month six is typically still calibrating their outreach approach. Not because they are slow, but because the feedback loop of send, receive, refine takes time to produce usable signal when you are processing it alone.

Inside a cohort, that loop runs across ten simultaneous searches in different sectors. A CIR running HVAC outreach notices that formal acquisition language produces low response rates from Belgian SME founders. That observation reaches the fire safety CIR, the logistics CIR, and the healthcare CIR before any of them has made the same mistake three times. The institutional learning circulates faster than any single searcher can replicate independently.

The practical effect is timeline compression. The 2024 Stanford GSB Search Fund Study reports a median search duration of 20 months for traditional solo searchers. European contexts frequently extend this to 24 months or beyond, where cross-border complexity, language barriers, and thinner deal intermediary networks add friction at every stage. WAD's 9 to 15 month target is not an aspiration built on optimistic assumptions. It is the product of arriving on day one with 60,000 pre-screened companies, a configured CRM, tested outreach sequences, legal templates used across multiple closed deals, and a cohort of peers who are six months ahead of you in the same process.

Weekly cohort calls run on Thursdays. A CIR who spent the prior week negotiating confidentiality terms with a nervous founder brings that experience to a peer who is two weeks behind them. A CIR who just signed a term sheet explains which clauses generated friction and why. This is not mentorship in the traditional sense. Mentors offer frameworks. The cohort offers operational intelligence from the current week.

Browse thecurrent residents across sectors from healthcare to data technology to end-of-life services. The diversity is deliberate: parallel searches across unrelated sectors generate cross-pollinating sourcing intelligence that a single-sector fund cannot reproduce.

What Comes After the Sourcing Phase?

Once a CIR secures a letter of intent, Phase 2 begins. Step 7 covers business and financial planning across 15 days. Step 8 builds the CARE-PROFIT model impact assessment and digitalisation strategy for the target company, also across 15 days. Step 9 is comprehensive due diligence across HR, technical, financial, customer, and competitive dimensions, with the investment committee reviewing findings and approving or rejecting the acquisition before the CIR engages banks. Step 9(bis) requires a minimum of three LOIs from financial institutions before closing.

The sourcing infrastructure does not disappear once a CIR finds their target. The Deal Intelligence Platform shifts from pipeline management to due diligence support. Jurimesh, WAD's legal technology partner, handles contract review — compressing what would be weeks of manual legal analysis into a structured, faster workstream.

The search phase is where most ETA programmes lose candidates to timeline fatigue. The infrastructure described above is why WAD's does not.

If you are a mid-to-senior executive considering Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA*) and want to understand whether the CEO-in-Residence Programme is the right vehicle, start with theprogramme FAQ. Applications for Cohort 2026 are open at/join-cir.