Buyer List
40–80 strategic and financial buyers, ranked by fit. Includes contact-ready LinkedIn profiles, recent M&A activity per buyer, and outreach-ready email drafts personalised to each buyer's thesis.
Your analyst hasn't slept in three weeks. The pitch is Friday. We built the other side of the 80-hour buyer list — 48-hour turnaround on memos, comps, buyer universes, and process design. Priced per deliverable. Prepared by operators.
Built for boutique M&A advisory firms, mid-market investment banks, and lower middle-market PE. We run a cross-referenced source stack — SEC, Companies House, Bolagsverket, Crunchbase, news aggregation — and integrate with your Pitchbook, Capital IQ, or Mergermarket license when available. Senior review on every deliverable.
What we deliver
You send a brief. We return a document within 48 to 72 hours. Same shape as what your junior analyst would produce, without the 80-hour week.
40–80 strategic and financial buyers, ranked by fit. Includes contact-ready LinkedIn profiles, recent M&A activity per buyer, and outreach-ready email drafts personalised to each buyer's thesis.
20–30 page research memo on a target company. Industry context, financial summary, comparable transactions, strategic positioning, and key diligence flags. Formatted for partner review.
20 disclosed comparable transactions with multiples, deal structure, strategic rationale, and premia analysis. Covers the last 36 months globally for your sector.
15–20 page process-design memo for a board evaluating strategic alternatives. Readiness gates, process architecture options, sequenced buyer list with named partners, fireside-chat framework, information-staging plan, risk register, 14-week timeline. Built to be the scaffold of your pitch to the target.
Quarterly deep-dive on a sector: active buyers, completed transactions, funding rounds, leadership changes, regulatory shifts, and 10 companies that look ripe for sell-side conversations.
Every Monday morning: 10–20 companies in your target sector worth screening, with the trigger event (funding, leadership change, competitor deal, earnings miss) and suggested next action.
Why the pricing
A research memo at Acuity, Evalueserve, or similar offshore research firms typically costs $12,000–25,000 and takes 10–14 days. We charge $6,500 and deliver in 48 hours because our editorial model compresses sourcing and structuring without compressing judgment. Senior review on every output. Three sample deliverables are published below — HMS Networks, Phreesia, and Phreesia process design — showing the format and standard we hold on your brief. We're not a cheaper alternative — we're a different model.
What you send us
No intake form. No onboarding call. No slide deck. You email one paragraph to ben@operatorassociates.com and we confirm scope within two hours.
Hi Benjamin,
We have a sell-side mandate signed with a European industrial software company. €18M ARR, 40% EBITDA margins, growing 28% YoY, headquartered in Nordics with customers across DACH. We want a buyer list by Friday.
Parameters:
— Target buyer types: strategic industrials (priority) + sponsors active in vertical SaaS
— Deal size range: €150M–€280M enterprise value
— Geographies: Europe + US
— Excluded: any buyer we've approached in last 18 months (list attached)
NDA attached. Let me know if you need anything else.
— Partner name
That's the whole thing. If we have clarifying questions we ask inside two hours. Otherwise, work starts immediately and you have a draft on your desk 48 hours later.
The 48 hours
You email the brief. We confirm receipt within 30 minutes. If anything is unclear we ask inside two hours; otherwise work starts immediately.
Agent pipeline runs against SEC, Companies House, Bolagsverket, Crunchbase, GDELT news, LinkedIn, and press-release archives. For buyer lists, this scopes the full universe — typically 200–500 candidates — before ranking.
Agent synthesises raw sources into the deliverable structure. For a buyer list: ranking, rationale per buyer, contact identification, draft outreach per buyer. For a memo: outline, drafting section-by-section with source attribution throughout.
Founder reviews line by line. Fact-checks surprising claims. Cuts weak rationale. Rewrites anything that reads like AI. Flags low-confidence data points explicitly in the document.
Formatted in your firm's template if provided. PDF + editable Google Doc (or Word). Delivered with full source log — every claim traceable to its source. Short cover email summarising key findings and any open questions.
One round of revisions is included. You reply with changes; we turn around within 24 hours. If further revisions are needed they're added to your retainer or billed at $400/hour.
Sample deliverables
An anonymised excerpt from a buyer list delivered for a mid-market sell-side in European industrial software. Eight hours of analyst time compressed into 48 hours end-to-end. Three longer-form samples follow below.
| Rank | Buyer | Type | Rationale | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hexagon AB (PPM) | Strategic | Acquired 3 adjacent asset-tracking plays 2023–25, public M&A mandate, active thesis on industrial digital-twin | A+ |
| 2 | Advent International (Fund X) | Sponsor | $3B fund with industrial automation thesis, current portfolio gap post-Planview exit, dry powder confirmed 2025-Q3 | A |
| 3 | Schneider Electric (Digital Svc) | Strategic | Pattern of bolt-ons under €200M, CEO commentary at CES on "industrial AI layer," geographic Nordic gap | A |
| 4 | IK Partners (Mid-cap Fund IX) | Sponsor | Active in Nordic industrial software since 2019, portfolio already includes adjacent company, cross-sell thesis | A− |
| 5 | Siemens AG (Digital Industries) | Strategic | Public M&A appetite restated at 2025 Capital Markets Day, acquisitive in connected-factory layer, pricing may be slow | B+ |
Each buyer includes a personalised outreach email drafted in your firm's voice, referencing the specific thesis or recent deal that makes this buyer relevant. Forwarded to the right contact (typically Head of Corporate Development for strategics, Principal for sponsors).
67 buyers evaluated, 12 advanced, 32 parked with rationale, 23 eliminated. Full log included in the delivered document. Source attribution on every data point.
Prepared by OPERATÖR · 48 hours after brief received
Example is illustrative. All names and figures anonymised from a real delivered buyer list. Your version runs on your brief.
Three full samples available
All three samples built on public data. Same format, same editorial standard as what we deliver on your brief.
The math
Junior analyst time is the bottleneck on every sell-side mandate. Here is the explicit math on a single buyer list, compared against both in-house and offshore research firms.
Acuity / Evalueserve (offshore)
OPERATÖR
Against in-house: your analyst typically burns 60–90 hours on buyer list research at $180/h fully loaded (~$12,000–$17,000 all-in), plus 4–8 hours of senior review. OPERATÖR replaces both cost and calendar time at half the spend. But the real value is not the cost saving — it is what your analyst does with those 60 hours: client conversations, deal execution, judgment calls no AI can make.
Multiplied across the deals you run per year, the savings finance the retainer several times over. But the real value is not the cost saving — it's that your junior analyst spends those 60 hours on the three things no AI can do: client conversations, deal execution, and judgment calls on structure.
Compared to the alternatives
Data & methodology
Every deliverable includes a source log. You know exactly where every data point came from and how we scored confidence. No black-box AI output.
SEC EDGAR (US), Companies House (UK), Bolagsverket (SE), Unternehmensregister (DE), and equivalent registries across Europe. Structured financial data on every reporting entity.
Crunchbase, OpenCorporates, GDELT news aggregation, LinkedIn enrichment. Cross-referenced to catch gaps that single-source databases miss — particularly sub-$50M mid-market private companies outside the US.
If your firm has Pitchbook, Capital IQ, Mergermarket, or Preqin, we integrate with your license via your API credentials. You pay nothing extra. We layer intelligence on top of data you already own.
NDA signed per engagement if requested. GDPR-compliant data processing agreement included. No training of external models on your briefs. Deliverables archived only for your reference and deleted on request.
Who this isn't for
Q&A management, buyer-side DD coordination, VDR automation — we don't touch MNPI yet. Stay with your current workflow for live deals; come to us for pre-engagement research only.
Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan all have 30-person research teams that produce buyer lists in-house. The maths doesn't work for you. We're built for firms with 5–40 deal professionals.
À la carte at $3,500 per output works fine for one-off needs. But the retainer math assumes meaningful deal flow. If you're running 1–3 deals a year, stay à la carte and buy as needed.
We're remote-first. Europe-based team, delivery via email. If your firm culture requires an on-site analyst or regular face-to-face, we aren't the fit. Hire a junior instead.
Pricing
Start with a single deliverable at list price. Convert to a retainer when you want predictable throughput.
For firms who want to try one deliverable before committing.
Pay per output
$3,500–$8,500 per document
For firms running 2–4 active deals at a time with predictable research needs.
$18,000
per month
For firms with 10+ active deals, sector programmes, and bespoke workflows.
$35,000+
per month
Month-to-month. Cancel anytime with 30 days' notice. Prices in USD, VAT added where applicable.
We keep 48 hours as the default to give senior review the time it deserves. When your pitch is Friday and the brief landed on Wednesday, we accelerate for a premium.
About
OPERATÖR is a research firm built on a new model: programmatic sourcing at the pace modern M&A requires, senior editorial review on every deliverable before it leaves the desk. We produce buyer lists, research memos, comparable transactions, and strategic-alternatives process-design memos for boutique M&A advisory firms, mid-market investment banks, and lower middle-market PE globally.
M.Sc. Stockholm School of Economics. Former M&A and SaaS operator. Currently Principal Product Manager at a US-listed technology company. Edits every deliverable before release.
OPERATÖR's proprietary sourcing and drafting infrastructure. Cross-references SEC EDGAR, Companies House, Bolagsverket, Crunchbase, GDELT news aggregation, and LinkedIn. Operated continuously in production since 2024. Every output traceable to its sources.
Methodology · Source log attached to every deliverable
Senior M&A practitioners review OPERATÖR methodology and sample output quarterly. Positions open to the right profile — former boutique M&A partners or corporate development heads from the mid-market space.
The quality standard on every deliverable is not "AI output" or "junior analyst output." It is the standard a managing director at a boutique bank would accept on their own desk, because that is who reviews it before it leaves.
Common questions
Every deliverable is reviewed line by line by the founder before it leaves the desk. Surprising claims are fact-checked. Weak rationale is cut. Data points with limited confidence are explicitly flagged in the document. The standard we hold is the standard a managing director at a boutique bank would accept on their own desk.
Briefs are encrypted at rest, processed in an EU-based environment, and not used to train any external AI model. We use Anthropic's API with zero-retention enabled. Deliverables are archived only for your reference and deleted on request. NDA signed per engagement if requested.
We don't require our own license. We run on a cross-referenced source stack — SEC, Companies House, Bolagsverket, Crunchbase, GDELT news, LinkedIn enrichment — which catches gaps in Pitchbook's coverage of sub-$50M private companies, especially in Europe. If your firm has Pitchbook or Capital IQ, we integrate with your license on your brief.
Not at this tier. OPERATÖR is built for the pre-engagement research phase — origination, pitch, buyer list, sector intelligence. For active data-room work on live deals, we recommend continuing with your existing workflow. We're developing an enterprise tier for this use case; ask us if you need it.
You get one round of revisions included. If after revisions you still don't find it useful, we'll refund the fee. We'd rather you try a different firm than have a bad deliverable on your desk. The goal is to build a relationship, not sell you one document.
Our research pipeline — OPERATÖR OS — handles programmatic sourcing and first-draft structuring across SEC, Companies House, Bolagsverket, Crunchbase, news, and LinkedIn. The founder reviews and edits every deliverable before it leaves, line by line. No account managers in between, no offshore subcontractors. You deal with the editor directly.
Month-to-month. 30 days' notice to cancel. We don't believe in annual lock-ins at this stage. You keep us because you want to, not because you have to.
Yes. For the first 10 firms we work with, we produce the first deliverable at zero cost — a buyer list or research memo on a sector you choose, delivered in 48 hours, no commitment after. Most firms convert to a retainer within 30 days of seeing the first output.
Send a brief. Get a finished document in 48 hours. If it doesn't land in your workflow, full refund. No demo. No onboarding. No annual contract.
Or reply with a sector and we'll send you a sample research memo on a public comparable company within 48 hours. No commitment.