Building a Search Fund Acquisition Pipeline with Clay (PART 1)
What I Planned to Build + Why
Background
Over the past year, I’ve met several individuals pursuing search funds – individuals raising capital to find, acquire, and operate a single owner-operated SME, below the radar of institutional buyers.
The most interesting part of these conversations was often how these individuals were going about finding a business that they want to buy.
Most were using a combination of outbound (telephone, email, direct mail) and inbound (press, online communities). But none had a systematic process behind it.
The Project
Inspired by the above conversations – and as an excuse to play with the latest GTM tools – I set myself a challenge: build a full acquisition pipeline from scratch. One that could:
Pull the addressable market.
Score businesses against acquisition criteria.
Enrich the dataset with contact details.
Write personalised outreach messages.
Push everything to an outreach sending tool.
I’ve documented this project across three articles:
Part 1 - what I planned to build + why.
Part 2 - how I built it.
Part 3 - how I’d improve it.
The Target
My target company should meet the following criteria:
UK plumbing business.
Generating £2M–£8M in revenue (£1M+ EBITDA).
Run by a founding director in their late fifties or sixties.
Debt-free, no insolvency, no broker involved.
The logic behind the above is straightforward. A business like this sits below the threshold a typical PE firm would touch - but generates enough EBITDA to make a search fund transaction viable.
At that age, the owner is approaching retirement with limited options: shut it down, hand it to a family member who doesn’t want it, or sell. That dynamic creates more receptivity to creative structures like seller financing.
Traditional deal sourcing relies on intermediaries who take a cut and only surface businesses already committed to selling. The goal here is to get upstream - reach owners before they’ve listed, before the valuation conversation has started, while seller financing is still on the table.
Technology Stack
The technology stack I use:
Claude Code - increasingly where I spend my time. The reason: context engineering. Using CLAUDE.md project files and persistent skills means Claude retains full project context across sessions.
WisprFlow - voice-to-text, speeds up everything.
Clay.com - data orchestration, enrichment, outreach logic.
Companies House API - the primary data source.
Email finding - Prospeo, Apollo (waterfall: try each provider in sequence, stop on first hit). No single provider has complete coverage of the UK SME market, so chaining multiple sources meaningfully increases hit rate while only charging for providers actually queried.
Phone finding - Surfe, Phantombuster (same waterfall logic).
Email verification - MillionVerifier.
Sending infrastructure - Smartlead / Instantly.
The Constraints
Two self-imposed constraints shaped the entire build.
Timeframe - three hours. Hard stop. This prevents scope creep.
Cost - no subscriptions beyond Claude. Everything had to run on free tiers.
The free Clay tier is the largest binding constraint. Three limitations worth flagging:
50 rows - the HTTP API import is capped. The full Companies House dataset for SIC 43220 runs to ~52,000 companies.
Limited Claygent credits - web research, email finding waterfalls, and phone enrichment all consume credits. This restricted the creativity that I could apply in my build.
No mobile phone enrichment - the mobile waterfall requires a paid plan. For a 60-year-old owner-operator, mobile is the right channel. This is a meaningful gap in practice.
Despite the above, a working end-to-end pipeline is possible.
Design Principles
Three principles governed every decision in the build:
Data dependency - never run a step before its required inputs exist.
Eliminate before enriching - filter bad rows before spending credits.
Cheap before expensive - run free steps first; gate expensive steps behind them.