Before you raise a search fund, there’s a stretch of time where you’ve committed to the path—but haven’t raised a dollar. You’re not quite a searcher, but you’re already doing the work. This series is about that period: what it looked like for us, what we learned, and what we’d do differently if we had to do it again.

I’ll try to keep it useful, stay honest, and avoid pretending there’s one right way to do any of this. There isn’t. Here's what's to come:

A 4-Part Series

1. Getting Ready to Raise (this post)
Three lessons on developing a thesis and building a pitch that actually worked

2. Fundraising
What moved the needle—and what didn’t

3. Cap Table Tetris
Choosing investors, saying no, and staying principled

4. Behind the Curtain (likely multiple posts)
Budgeting, tech stack, and other unsexy realities

Before we ever pitched an investor, we spent weeks trying to make sense of what we were doing and why. What kind of business were we looking for? Why did we believe we were the ones to run it? And how do you say all that without sounding like a robot? This post covers three lessons from that stretch—each one critical to getting our fundraise off the ground.

Lesson 1: Have a Personal Story—and Ideally, a Related Thesis

My search partner John and I had nearly two decades of combined experience at McMaster-Carr Supply Co, and we believed that gave us a right to win in the industrial space. We built everything around that. When we started, our thesis was broad: machine shops, value-added industrial distributors, and product manufacturers. In other words, core industrial businesses.

But once we started pressure-testing the model, the edges started to fray. Many of the businesses we liked had heavy capex and weak free cash flow conversion—two things that don’t mix well with debt-funded acquisitions. So we adjusted. Machine shops became specialty manufacturers. Product manufacturing got cut entirely. And we added industrial services, where cash flow tends to be steadier and the asset intensity is lower.

The core idea didn’t change. We were still focused on industrial businesses, and we still believed our operational backgrounds gave us a unique edge. But we needed to refine where we’d start—and why.

Not every searcher has a thesis that ties cleanly to their background. That’s fine. But if you don’t, you still need a story—some reason that makes you the right person to be doing this.

For us, the thesis wasn’t just a checkbox. It was the throughline. The thing that made the rest of it make sense. If you don’t have one yet, build one. Or find someone who did this another way, and learn from them. I just know we couldn’t have done it without one.

Lesson #2: Make the Private Placement Memorandum (PPM) Yours

We started with the PPM Template from the Stanford Search Fund Primer—because we're not idiots. It’s well-structured, familiar to investors, and it lowers the chance of accidentally skipping something important.

But we didn’t leave it untouched. From the start, we knew our differentiator wasn’t our financial modeling or our search geography. It was our operating experience. So we moved our backgrounds up and built the thesis around them, not after them. We also brought our industry focus into the foreground—listing specific business characteristics we were drawn to and how we planned to add value, rather than burying it in the appendix like a footnote.

The bones of the PPM stayed the same. But the tone, emphasis, and flow changed a lot. The result felt more like ours, and from what we could tell, it landed that way to investors too.

Lesson 3: Refine by Doing

The hardest part of building the PPM wasn’t formatting pages or summarizing our resumes. It was knowing when to stop. As two ex-McMaster-Carr operators, we were wired to make things thorough, well-reasoned, and airtight; McMaster's culture was built around the pursuit of operational perfection. That instinct served us well… up to a point.

We spent too much time trying to pick the “right” sub-industries and not enough time articulating the kinds of businesses we actually wanted to run. Our early drafts had a full page on each industrial vertical. By the end, we’d cut that down to a few bullets and used the space to talk about business characteristics instead—cash flow profile, pricing power, regulatory hooks, etc.

We also over-indexed on tuck-in acquisitions. It’s something we genuinely care about and plan to pursue, but it didn’t warrant the repeated airtime we gave it. A couple of thoughtful lines would’ve been more than enough.

The biggest thing we learned? Accepting that the PPM didn’t need to be perfect before we started talking to investors. We could’ve started earlier—especially with investors we liked but didn’t expect to close. The price of failing with them was low. The upside was huge.

Every call made the pitch sharper. One truly awkward conversation taught us more than a week of tinkering. I can't stress that enough.

Up Next: Fundraising

With the thesis locked and the PPM in hand, we were technically ready to raise. But we didn’t just hit send and hope. We built a strategy—tiered outreach, sequenced conversations, and early pitches designed to fail fast and get better.

That’s where we’ll pick up in Part 2: how we approached fundraising, what actually created momentum, and what we’d do differently if we had to do it again.