Most PE firms see 20-30% of their addressable market.

Not because the other 70% doesn't exist. Because those companies aren't on your radar.

The Invisible Majority

They're not in databases with meaningful data. They're not working with sell-side advisors yet. They're not mentioned in trade press. They're not attending industry conferences.

They're just trading profitably. Growing steadily. Owned by founders aged 58-67 who are starting to think about succession.

Perfect proprietary targets. Completely invisible to traditional sourcing.

Why This Matters

Let's do the math:

2,000 companies in your addressable market. You see 30% = 600 companies. Maybe 120 are transaction-ready. You engage meaningfully with 12 per year.

Now imagine you could see 80% instead. That's 1,600 companies. 320 ready. 32 meaningful engagements.

You just tripled your pipeline without working harder. You changed what you could see.

The Proprietary Advantage

It's not just better economics (8% discount to auctions).

It's that you're accessing better businesses before 47 other bidders see the CIM. The founder-owned, profitable company that's never been shopped doesn't have a process. They have a 63-year-old founder thinking about what's next.

First access matters. Coverage matters more.

The Research Trap

Here's what your Associates are doing:

6 hours per company on research before outreach. Finding: estimated financials, incomplete ownership structure, unknown advisor relationships, guessed transaction timing.

That's 30 hours per week generating 5 conversations per month.

The issue isn't effort. It's signal quality.

What Changes With Better Prioritization

30 minutes researching a 75-scoring company beats 6 hours on a 40-scoring one.

Without transaction-readiness signals, you're optimizing for volume, not conversion. More research doesn't help if you're researching the wrong companies.

The firms with systematic origination score first, research second. They spend their limited hours on companies that are actually ready.

Time is the constraint. Prioritization is the edge.

The Question

How much of your addressable market are you actually seeing?

Not how many targets are in your CRM. Of all the companies that fit your thesis, what percentage do you even know exist?

The other 60-80% aren't choosing not to engage with you. They don't know you exist either.

That's the visibility gap. And it's your biggest constraint on deal flow.

The Bottom Line

You can't source what you can't see.

Traditional origination gives you visibility into the loud minority: companies with advisors, press coverage, complete database profiles.

The quiet majority—profitable, founder-owned, approaching succession—stays invisible. Not because they're unsourceable. Because your process wasn't built to find them.

The firms winning on origination aren't working harder. They're seeing more.

What's your research-to-conversation ratio? And what percentage of your market are you missing entirely?

The best proprietary deals aren't found through better research. They're found through better coverage.