Boathouse Capital provides flexible capital to growth and later-stage businesses in the software, healthcare, and tech-enabled services sectors. With its partnership-first and creative approach to delivering capital, Boathouse has invested more than $1.5 billion in cutting-edge companies including AnalyticsIQ, Choozle, Mediafly, and Sageworks.
To continue to scale and stand out in today’s hyper-competitive dealmaking landscape, Boathouse Capital sought to expand its intermediary-driven sourcing approach to include proprietary, directly sourced opportunities. As the firm’s M&A Director, Steve Dressel took on the initiative and was tasked with discovering new thesis-driven platform investments, as well as highly specific add-on opportunities for existing portfolio companies.
However, finding reliable revenue and operating data for growth-stage companies not actively seeking investment wasn’t easy. Steve spent hours each day manually piecing together information from Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and Google search in spreadsheets, since the firm’s CRM couldn’t handle the influx of data. “We just didn’t have the right tools,” recalls Steve. “We wound up with a lot of bad emails and outdated information that made my job so much harder.”
“We knew that building a proprietary deal machine would majorly differentiate our firm, not just to our LPs, but also to our current and potential portfolio companies,” adds Colin Raws, Boathouse’s Partner, Head of Business Development and Investor Relations. To achieve this goal, Steve needed a faster, easier, and more accurate way to uncover promising opportunities and determine whether they were the right fit for Boathouse.
Whether searching for a platform investment or an add-on opportunity, Steve now starts the sourcing process using Sourcescrub ’s private company intelligence platform. “By the end of every day I usually have thirty Sourcescrub tabs open with various company profiles, buyer guides, and conference lists,” shares Steve. “I honestly don’t know where I would start without it at this point.”
Depending on specific thesis criteria, Steve uses Sourcescrub to surface and compile lists of relevant companies based on a unique combination of data signals including employee growth and last funding date. To better organize and manage these lists, Steve tags them in Sourcescrub, and even sometimes uses the tool’s custom scoring functionality to rank and prioritize top-performing targets.
He then passes these lead lists directly to Salesforce using Sourcescrub’s pre-built CRM integration and robust enrichment functionality.
From there, the leads are placed into the appropriate outreach cadence in Boathouse’s sales acceleration tool, Salesloft. Steve explains, “Sourcescrub is an integral part of moving large quantities of data very quickly and being able to parse through it so that we can then push the right outreach through Salesloft.”
Steve also relies on Sourcescrub to track and receive real-time alerts about the firm’s tier one targets, such as any new conferences they plan to attend or any leadership changes they make. “These kinds of compelling events give me an excuse to reach out to companies in much more timely and personalized ways,” he says.
Boathouse has officially established a successful direct sourcing operation, with 40% of its total deal flow now originating in Sourcescrub. “Sourcescrub has completely transformed my sourcing efforts,” shares Steve. “It makes finding companies that match specific thesis criteria or add-on requirements a much more direct and efficient process than I ever thought possible.”
According to Colin, adding direct sourcing on top of the firm’s work with financial intermediaries has been a big competitive advantage for Boathouse. “Our ability to consistently generate high-value proprietary deals is a major differentiator and gives our firm credibility with our LPs,” he says. “It shows that we have an impressive tech stack and well-oiled process for forcing deal flow and systematically scaling the firm — and we wouldn’t have any of that without Sourcescrub."
Since using Sourcescrub, Boathouse has seen an 300% improvement in its number of proprietary opportunities. The firm has also increased won add-on deals by 50% — another differentiator that enables them to pitch new platform opportunities with potential add-ons already in mind. Showing this level of investment and market insight so early in the deal flow process helps Boathouse out- shine the competition and close deals faster.
“I love it when an executive comes to me with a list of 5-10 potential add-on companies,” tells Steve, “and I’m able to turn around, log into Sourcescrub, and come back to them with 30 more names almost immediately.” Overall, Steve estimates that the tool has increased his sourcing productivity by 50%.
“Our platform company executives and CEOs have been nothing but excited about the super bespoke add-on opportunities we’ve been able to bring to them because of Sourcescrub,” concludes Colin.
“We close investments because of Sourcescrub — proprietary opportunities we would otherwise never know about."
