Vice President of Business Development

Overview

You're the first dedicated BD hire at a permanent hold company that buys and operates small to mid-sized businesses. Your job is to source proprietary deals—meaning you find business owners before they decide to sell, build relationships over months or years, and get them to consider your company when they're ready. You report directly to senior leadership and design the sourcing playbook as you go.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Private / Mature ($1B+ AUM)

Size: Unknown (likely 20-50 employees across portfolio)

Growth: Actively building out origination capabilities - you're the first BD hire

Market Position: Long-term hold strategy differentiates them from traditional PE (3-7 year exit timelines)

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 90% Cold outbound - you're researching businesses, finding owners, and reaching out cold
• 10% Warm referrals - from existing portfolio CEOs, advisors, lawyers, accountants
• 0% Inbound - business owners don't know this company exists yet

Support Structure: No SDR support. No marketing engine. You're building the database, the outreach strategy, the messaging, and the relationship management process yourself.

Decision Makers: You're selling to business owners (often founders) who haven't decided to sell yet. Most aren't working with bankers or running a process when you first reach them.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors:

• Traditional PE funds (shorter hold periods, more aggressive leverage)
• Strategic acquirers in target industries
• Other permanent capital firms (Constellation Software model, Berkshire Hathaway approach)
• Investment bankers running organized sale processes

How They Differentiate: Long-term hold (no forced exit), operational partnership approach, keep existing management teams, less aggressive leverage than traditional PE

Common Objections:

• "I'm not ready to sell yet"
• "I want to run a full process with a banker to maximize value"
• "What's the catch with permanent hold?"
• "How do you make money if you're not exiting?"

Win Themes: Cultural fit, operational support without interference, certainty of close, flexible deal structures, long-term partnership vs. financial engineering

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Prospecting/Research (40%) | Active Relationship Building (35%) | Internal Coordination (25%)

Key Activities

• Target Identification: Research industries and companies that fit the acquisition criteria (likely $5-50M revenue range, profitable, fragmented markets). Build lists of 100-200 targets per quarter across different sectors.
• Cold Outreach: Send 30-50 personalized emails and make 20-30 calls per week to business owners. Most ignore you. You're trying to book 3-5 exploratory calls per week with owners who will take your call.
• Relationship Cultivation: Stay in touch with 50-100 business owners who aren't ready to sell yet but might be in 1-3 years. Quarterly check-ins, sharing industry insights, building trust over time.
• Initial Qualification: Run discovery conversations with owners to understand their business model, growth trajectory, and eventual exit thinking. Assess fit before bringing in senior leadership or beginning formal diligence.
• Process Management: Once an owner is serious, coordinate their interactions with your investment team, manage the LOI process, and keep the deal moving through diligence.
• Building the Playbook: Document what's working in sourcing, refine messaging, build out CRM workflows, and create the repeatable process for future BD hires.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Rejection is constant: 95%+ of your outreach gets no response. Business owners are skeptical of cold approaches about selling their company.
• Timelines are brutal: You might spend 18 months building a relationship with an owner, get them interested, and then they decide to wait another 2 years or take a strategic offer instead.
• You're building from zero: There's no established process, no deal flow machine running, no brand recognition in the market. You're figuring it out as you go.
• Internal selling: You have to convince your investment team that targets are worth their time to evaluate, even though most won't close.
• Ambiguous metrics: Unlike quota-carrying sales roles, success is measured in relationship quality and eventual deal flow, not monthly bookings. Hard to show progress quarter to quarter.

What Success Looks Like

• Building a pipeline of 30-50 active relationships with business owners at various stages of consideration
• Getting 2-3 owners per quarter into serious conversations with your investment team
• Closing 3-5 LOIs per year (though some will fall out in diligence)
• Creating a repeatable sourcing process that can be scaled when they hire BD person #2

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• Founder-owners of small to mid-sized businesses ($5-50M revenue typically)
• Second or third-generation family business owners considering their options

What They Care About:

• Legacy and culture preservation: Will you keep their team intact and maintain what they built?
• Deal certainty: Can you actually close vs. PE funds that tie up their business for 90 days then reprice?
• Valuation: Are they getting fair value without running a competitive process?
• Post-close role: Do they stay involved, transition out gradually, or exit completely?
• Speed and simplicity: Can you move quickly with a clean process vs. investment bankers dragging out a 6-month sale?

Requirements

• 3-5+ years in private equity (analyst through associate level) or corporate development at a PE-backed company
• Experience sourcing deals proactively, not just evaluating inbound opportunities from bankers
• Proven ability to build relationships with business owners and CEOs, not just other finance professionals
• Comfortable with ambiguity - you're building the function, not executing an established playbook
• Strong financial modeling and business evaluation skills to qualify opportunities quickly
• Self-directed work style - no one is managing your daily activity or pipeline