Solganick is a boutique investment bank advising software, IT-services, and digital-media companies on M&A and capital raises. Since 2009 the firm has advised on transactions across cybersecurity, cloud managed services, data/AI, and vertical SaaS — typically competing against larger banks on deals in the $20M–$250M enterprise-value range.
In a market where the best mandates go to the advisor who reaches the founder first with a credible, sector-specific point of view, origination cadence matters. Solganick's constraint was never insight — it was analyst hours.
The challenge
Before Deliverables AI, a single thesis — say, "lower-middle-market MSPs with recurring revenue above 60% and a Microsoft-first stack" — meant days of manual work:
- An analyst pulled companies from PitchBook, Grata, and LinkedIn into a spreadsheet.
- Each name was researched by hand: ownership, funding history, headcount trend, service mix, likely seller motivation.
- A partner then hand-wrote outreach that actually sounded like it came from someone who understood the business.
The firm estimated that roughly half of the deal team's week went to list-building and research before a single founder was contacted. In practice that held credible outreach to around 12 qualified founder conversations a month — and when a live situation surfaced, Solganick was sometimes a step behind larger banks.
"We were doing careful, sector-deep analysis. We just couldn't do quite enough of it, quite fast enough." — Aaron Solganick
What changed
Solganick rebuilt origination around a repeatable Deliverables AI workflow that trims the slowest parts of the process.
1. Thesis → screened shortlist faster
Using Build Target List, the team turns a plain-English thesis into a screened, ranked universe. A recent cybersecurity screen produced a first-pass shortlist of roughly 35 companies in an afternoon, each with a fit score, rationale, revenue and headcount estimates, ownership status, and named contacts. The full research pack that used to take about three days now comes together in about two.
2. Grounded research on the shortlist
Deep Research runs cited research on each shortlisted company — funding history, leadership changes, product launches, hiring signals — and stages the findings as durable project sources, so a partner walks into the first call already briefed.
3. Outreach that sounds like the desk wrote it
Prospect outreach drafts per-founder emails off those briefs — referencing the specific product, a recent milestone, and a relevant Solganick comp. The partners still edit and personalize, but they start from a strong draft instead of a blank page.
4. Same-week materials when a conversation turns real
When a founder engages, Teaser and CIM skills produce the first client-ready materials in Solganick's house style, cited to the underlying data.
By the numbers
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Qualified founder conversations / month | ~12 | ~15 |
| Share of week spent on pre-outreach research | ~50% | ~35% |
| Time to build + research a target list | ~3 days | ~2 days |
| Mandates won (trailing 12 months) | baseline | +2 |
The result
Origination now runs at a steadier, more sustainable pace. Over the past year Solganick lifted qualified founder conversations by roughly 25% (about 12 to 15 a month), freed up close to a day of analyst time per thesis, and credits the extra reach with two additional mandates it might otherwise have missed.
Just as important, the partners got some of their week back — and spend it where a boutique actually wins: in conversations with founders. As Solganick puts it, that's the difference between preparing deals and winning them.