Origination is the only part of the job you fully control
Intermediated processes are competitive by design
When a teaser arrives from a bank, so does the fact that eleven other funds received it. Price discovery is the point of that process, and it works. What it does not do is give a firm any structural advantage. The advantage, if there is one, comes from the conversations that started three years earlier with a promoter who was not selling.
Proprietary origination is unglamorous work: a list of companies in a sector, a named owner for each, a target touchpoint frequency, and a record of what was said last time. Firms talk about it constantly and few measure it, because the tooling they use cannot answer the only question that matters, which is how many relationships in the coverage list have actually been touched this quarter.
The mid-market promoter conversation is a multi-year one
Owner-managed businesses do not decide on a fund's timetable. A promoter meets you, is polite, and says the family is not ready. Two years later a succession question, a capex requirement or a competitor exit changes that. The call they make is to whoever stayed present without being tiresome, and staying present is a scheduling problem that no inbox solves.