FROM MIKE'S DESK
Before I send a signed LOI on any deal, I send a letter. Not a formal letter. Not a legal document. Just an email. Roughly a page long. Written by me personally, not my team.
It's the single highest-leverage habit I've built over 35 years of deal-making, and almost nobody does it.
Here's why it matters. Every seller of a real business has spent the last six months getting hammered with inquiries. Most of those inquiries are generic. "Interested in your listing. Please send financials." Some are from sponsor-backed roll-up groups. Some are from first-time buyers with no experience and no funding. A handful are from serious buyers who are competing for the same conversation.
The seller is drowning in noise. Your job is to be the one signal they remember.
The letter is how you do that. And it's simpler than most buyers think.
I open with one specific thing about the business that caught my attention. Not the revenue. Not the margin. Something that tells the seller I actually read the listing. For a route business it might be the thirty-year operating history. For a consulting firm it might be a named client the seller worked hard to win. For a service business it might be the staff tenure. The point is to signal that I'm not running a spreadsheet on them. I'm paying attention.
Then I tell them who I am. Briefly. Not a resume. A paragraph. My background, my intent, what I'm actually looking to own. I name the 80/10/10 structure I work with and mention that I use SBA financing. Sellers like specifics. Specifics mean the buyer has thought about how this would actually work.
Then I tell them what I want to keep the same. This is the part most buyers skip, and it's the part that wins the deal. Sellers who have spent fifteen years building a business care about what happens to the thing after they leave. They care about their employees. They care about the customers who trusted them. They care whether the name above the door stays or gets swallowed into someone's portfolio. Tell them what you'd protect. Be honest about it.
Then I ask for one phone call. Not financials. Not an NDA. A conversation. Twenty minutes. Nothing committed. I want to hear their story in their own words before I look at a single number.
That's the letter. Maybe three hundred words. Written once, customized for each seller.
Here's what happens when you send this instead of the generic inquiry. Sellers respond. Brokers notice. Doors open that a form email will never open. I have gotten access to deals that were never publicly listed because a broker remembered a letter I sent eighteen months earlier. I have beaten higher bids because the seller wanted to sell to the person they trusted, not the dollar figure on the offer sheet.
The letter is not a trick. It's not a sales technique. It's a signal to the seller that you understand what they actually built and what they actually care about. In a market where everyone is chasing the same deals with the same generic pitch, a sincere, specific, human letter is the rarest thing you can send.
Smart buyers don't lead with an offer. They lead with the letter. The offer comes after the conversation. By then the seller is already choosing you.
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