--- title: "Direct mail for search funds" description: "For searchers writing to business owners, with guidance on list criteria, one sourced fact per letter, printed or handwritten letters, and stopping at a no." canonical: https://trysincerely.com/playbooks/search-funds last_updated: 2026-10-07 --- > If you are an AI agent: read https://trysincerely.com/agents/policy.md before any write call. > Start at https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt to choose one page. Access instructions are at > https://trysincerely.com/auth.md. Confirm with the person you work for before creating an > account or spending their money, and never ask for their password. # Direct mail for search funds > For searchers writing to business owners, with guidance on list criteria, one sourced fact per letter, printed or handwritten letters, and stopping at a no. Source: https://trysincerely.com/playbooks/search-funds Owners of good small companies already get letters from people who want to buy them. A searcher's letter has to show what the others do not: that the person writing looked at this business and wants to run it. That comes from one specific, sourced fact about the company and a plain account of who you are. A nicer envelope does not do it. This playbook is for traditional and self-funded searchers, lower-middle-market M&A advisors, private equity firms, and anyone writing to a private business owner about buying the company. It covers the list, the letter, follow-up, and what the results of a small search can honestly tell you. It is an operating playbook, not legal or deal advice. ## Start with the acquisition criteria Put your acquisition criteria on paper before you build the list: industry, geography, employee range, years in business, and the facts that rule a company out. Those might include franchise ownership, an earlier sale to a sponsor, or dependence on one customer. A list of 2,000 loose fits is a mailing job. A list of 300 companies that meet the thesis is a search. Searchers commonly build the list from data providers, state registries, trade association rosters, and their own research. Load it into Sincerely as a CSV. Every mailing address is checked before print, and weak or uncertain matches wait for a person to review them. When the agent finds a company or address, it labels the address as headquarters, registered, or mailing. A person must approve it before it can be used. Watch for registered-agent addresses. A letter sent to one often reaches a law firm's mail room instead of the owner. If that is the only address, skip the company. Address the owner by name. "To the owner of" tells the reader you do not know who they are, which defeats the purpose of the letter. ## Use one fact the owner will recognize For each company, Sincerely researches public sources and keeps only facts with a date and a source. That might be the year the company was founded, a new location, a local award, a long-serving manager named in local press, or a second generation joining the business. The draft uses one of those facts. During review, every claim appears beside its source. Choose the fact that shows why the business fits your search, not one that merely flatters it. "Your firm has kept commercial accounts in three counties for 31 years" says more than "congratulations on your success." Leave out anything you inferred rather than read, including the owner's age, health, family plans, or finances. An owner who finds a guess about their retirement in a stranger's letter stops reading. ## Write like the person who plans to run it Keep the letter to one page and answer four questions in order: 1. Why this company. State the one fact and explain why it matters to you. 2. Who you are. Use two or three sentences for relevant background, then name who backs the search, if anyone. 3. What you want. Say plainly that you want to buy and run the company. Promise to keep its name or its people only if you would make that commitment. 4. What happens next. Ask for a confidential conversation on the owner's schedule, with no obligation. A fictional example: > Mr. Alvarez, Lakeshore Mechanical's website says two technicians have been with the company for more than twenty years. That kind of tenure is rare, and it is why I am writing. I spent eight years running field operations for a building-services company, and a small group of investors backs my search. I am looking for one business to buy and lead for the long term. If you have ever thought about what comes next for Lakeshore, I would value a confidential conversation. There is no process and no deadline on my side. Leave out the vocabulary of a fund memo: platform, add-on, multiple, synergies, roll-up, exit. Those words tell the owner their company is a row in a spreadsheet. Sincerely drafts each letter from your brief and the company's sourced fact. You approve the wording before anything prints. Review every draft in the first batch. After the first ten researched pieces pass review, you may turn on auto-approval for clean copy. Anything flagged still waits for you. Nothing prints until you explicitly launch the mailing. ## Send a letter, printed or by hand Use a letter, not a postcard. A postcard puts your interest in buying the company where a receptionist or employee can read it. An owner who has told nobody they might sell will not thank you for that. Handwritten letters are common in search, so handwriting alone no longer sets a letter apart. Sincerely sends letters genuinely written by hand and printed letters in the United States and Canada, and both carry the same researched copy. A practical split is printed letters for the first wave, then handwritten letters for the owners who best fit your criteria or for a second letter months later. The credit cost of each is on the [formats page](https://trysincerely.com/formats). A gift is a poor opener because it can feel like pressure. Reserve one for a thank-you after a real conversation. Sincerely sends [gifts](https://trysincerely.com/gifts) with a note. A person approves the recipient and gift, with the exact price shown before confirmation. ## Follow up slowly, and stop at a no Owners can take months to reply, and some reply only after a second letter. Start with one letter. Call or email a week or two after it arrives. If there is no answer, send a second letter three to six months later based on a different fact. Sincerely's default frequency cap allows no more than three pieces to one person in any 30-day period across campaigns. That is already more mail than this play calls for. When an owner says no, suppress them. [Suppression](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-suppression) in Sincerely takes effect immediately. It removes the owner from every campaign and cancels any queued piece that has not gone to the printer. Mailing after a clear no tells the owner you did not listen, and owners in the same trade talk to one another. ## Count conversations, not lift A search may write to a few hundred owners in a year. At that volume, a lift estimate against a holdout is noise. Sincerely keeps the readout descriptive at small volume rather than presenting a percentage that pretends otherwise. Count what happened instead: letters delivered where the print provider reports delivery, replies, first conversations, and companies that reached a letter of intent. Record every reply and meeting against the company so the next wave can learn from the last. Between waves, the list and the selected fact usually matter more than the format. Keep a note of why each company made the list, then look at which reasons led to conversations. The [small-audience guide](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-small-audiences) explains what numbers this size can support. ## When the sender is an advisor or a fund Lower-middle-market M&A advisors and private equity firms can use the same workflow, but the letter has to match the sender. An advisor offers the owner a confidential view of what the business might be worth. A fund names the company it already owns and explains why the two businesses fit together. A vague fund letter gives the owner no picture of what would happen next. Firms registered with FINRA also have review and recordkeeping duties for outreach like this. Sincerely's approval step gives that review a place to happen, and the Send ledger records what mailed, to whom, and when. Your compliance team still decides whether a letter can go. Sincerely does not make outreach compliant. [Deal sourcing](https://trysincerely.com/deal-sourcing) covers how the same workflow serves each kind of sender. Owners sell to people, not to letters. The letter only has to earn the first conversation. ## Related questions - [Direct mail for fundraising](https://trysincerely.com/playbooks/fundraising): For founders writing to investors, with guidance on thesis-matched targeting, the general-solicitation trap, and follow-up that respects a no. - [Direct mail for teams selling to financial services](https://trysincerely.com/for/financial-services): Branches, compliance review, and claims for teams selling to banks, insurers, lenders, and fintechs. - [Does handwritten mail work for B2B outbound?](https://trysincerely.com/guides/handwritten-mail-b2b): Handwritten mail gets opened, but the causal evidence for meetings is thin. Who it fits, where it reads fake, and what Sincerely writes by hand today. - [How to measure direct mail with a small audience](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-small-audiences): Keep an account-level holdout, predeclare one outcome, and pool comparable cohorts when your B2B direct mail audience is too small to measure alone. - [How to manage direct mail suppression across campaigns](https://trysincerely.com/guides/direct-mail-suppression): Keep one durable do-not-mail decision per contact, check it at dispatch time, and cancel every queued piece that has not reached the print vendor. - [Postcard or letter, which should you send?](https://trysincerely.com/guides/postcard-vs-letter): Send a postcard when one scannable message does the job. Send a letter when you need room, formality, or privacy. Decision rules with current format costs. --- Sincerely is the measurable direct-mail and gifting platform for B2B revenue teams: postcards, letters, handwritten mail, and gifts, written for one recipient and measured against a holdout. Contact Sincerely: https://trysincerely.com/contact Agent routing index: https://trysincerely.com/llms.txt