The Challenge
ABridge Keystone was paying three separate sources for deal flow and still only seeing two or three owner conversations a week.
Arthur was running his own outreach alongside two outside vendors, one sending AI-generated email at volume and one doing cold calling. Between the three of them, fewer than 500 new companies were being contacted a week, and the output was two to three live owner conversations. The AI-only vendor produced the most volume and the least qualified conversations, and none of the vendors was working to a hard target. As Arthur put it, most of them were offering to do their best and see what happened.
For a search that needs to find one willing seller, the math is unforgiving. The fragmented market of owner-run industrial and field services businesses runs to tens of thousands of companies, and at a few hundred contacts a week it would take years to work through it once. Arthur needed the top of the funnel to be an order of magnitude bigger without the quality falling away, and he needed someone accountable to a number rather than to best efforts.
Our Solution
ToplineX mapped the full US market of essential services businesses, then paired high-volume cold email with warm calling inside fifteen minutes of every reply.
We built a complete picture of every US business matching the mandate: B2B, essential, owner-operated, $5m to $75m in revenue, across industrial and field services, skilled trades, testing and inspection, facilities, specialty distribution and the sectors next to them. Lookalike modeling against the nine businesses Arthur had already shortlisted gave us the shape of a good target, and a broader sweep then extended the list well past what any single database covers, including the service businesses with almost no LinkedIn or web presence.
On top of that list we ran campaigns built around succession rather than acquisition, matching the stewardship language Arthur leads with: thirty years in the business, no obvious successor, a recent move to Chairman, a family name still on the trucks. Every positive reply went to an SDR who called the owner within fifteen minutes, qualified them on size, ownership and openness to a conversation, and booked the meeting straight into Arthur's calendar. Arthur only ever sees a meeting after a human has screened it on the phone.
The Results
In the first six weeks, ABridge Keystone went from two or three owner conversations a week to between five and ten, with 39 qualified meetings booked.
From launch we contacted just over 26,000 business owners and generated 474 replies, 231 of which were owners interested enough to keep talking. Of those, 39 became qualified meetings in Arthur's calendar inside six weeks, running at five to ten every week consistently rather than arriving in bursts.
The step change was volume without a drop in quality. ABridge Keystone now reaches more owners in a week than its three previous sources reached in a month combined, and every meeting is screened by a person before it lands in the calendar. The replies also gave Arthur a live read on his market: which sectors were most open to a conversation, which owners were genuinely close to retirement, and which parts of the pitch earned a call.
5-10
qualified calls / wk
39
meetings in 6 wks
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