Six weeks ago I left a career in healthcare M&A to build something on my own.
I had a service menu. A newsletter with zero subscribers. And the confidence of someone who'd spent years in the deal seat running acquisitions, building pipelines, and sitting across from physician founders trying to decide whether to sell.
I thought I knew what the market wanted because I'd spent my career inside it.
I didn't.
I built a menu that covered the full M&A lifecycle. Research. Sourcing. Diligence support. Materials. I thought it was comprehensive. Professional. The kind of thing a serious firm would put in front of a prospect.
Every person who took a call asked for the same thing. Map the market. Enrich the targets. Tell me who to call first and why. The rest of it sat there. Nobody asked about it. Nobody cared.
I spent weeks refining services the market never requested. The market didn't want my menu. It told me what it wanted. I just wasn't listening.
Then I made it worse.
I had a prospect ask the best question a seller can hear: "What does an engagement look like?" Instead of getting on a call and walking them through the work, I sent a wall of text. Pricing tiers. Engagement structures. A PDF attachment. Silence.
Did it again with another prospect. Same result.
The work product was strong. I know that because the people who actually saw it live told me so. But I was so focused on looking like a real company that I overwhelmed people at the exact moment they were leaning in. I was packaging when I should have been listening.
Here's the part I haven't said out loud yet.
I don't have decades of gray hair in this space. But I can take a thesis, a geography, and a set of criteria and produce in days what would take most teams weeks. People who've seen the output have told me it fills a gap their current tools don't touch. And now I don't have a title or a company behind me. It's just the work.
I think most people in corp dev and on deal teams know that feeling. You're closing deals and somewhere in the back of your head you're still wondering if you're qualified.
Last week my dad asked me a question I've been avoiding.
"Are you on the road to success, or the road to ruin?"
He wasn't being cruel. He was being honest. And he followed it with: "Both are possible right now."
He's right. I have prospects in the pipeline, a newsletter with a 60%+ open rate, and conversations with fund managers, bankers, and corp dev leaders every week. I also have the kind of doubt that hits at 2am when the house is quiet and the spreadsheet is open.
Entrepreneurship will leave you bleeding on the curb while everyone else keeps driving by.
I thought about giving it all away. Screen sharing everything. Showing exactly how I build every workflow, every deliverable, every output. Just saying fuck it, maybe the audience is the business and the services were the wrong bet.
I didn't. Not because I think what I'm doing is so proprietary that nobody else could figure it out. But because the thing that makes the work valuable is not the tools. It's knowing what to ask for. It's knowing what a good target list looks like because you've built them under pressure with real money on the line. It's knowing which signals matter because you've watched deals die and opportunities walk out the door when someone missed them.
That doesn't come from a screen share. It comes from doing the work.
So here's where I am. Fewer services. Deeper focus. Building the infrastructure so someone's next hire, their intern, or their team hits the ground running with a prioritized, enriched target universe instead of starting from zero.
Every week I learn something that changes how I think about this business. Most of those lessons came from the people reading this email.
And that's the part I haven't leaned into enough. I've been telling you what I think the market needs. I haven't asked you.
So I'm asking.
If you're in healthcare M&A - PE, corp dev, banking, advisory - I want to hear from you. What is the most manual, time-consuming part of your sourcing or origination workflow right now? What do you wish someone would just handle for you?
Hit reply. I read every one. Your answer shapes what I build next.
I'm building this in public, in an industry that builds behind closed doors. If you're here, you're part of it.
-Shawn
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