We screened 280-something deals in the first half of 2022. So we are ahead of where we need to be to achieve our goal of screening 500 deals for the year. The problem we face is that we have a culture of filling our calendars with meetings before really understanding who we are talking to and why.

The result of this is dozens of conversations we probably would have opted not to have, or at least shortened, if we had just decided to screen the person/company before taking the meeting. There is no such thing as a bad interaction. You can learn something from any meeting. I find that you can have diminished returns, however, if you aren’t spending quality time researching markets, innovations, and trends on downtime as well. This is hard to do when you have back-to-back pitch calls.

We are reverting to first principles. We know that we need to screen 500-deals this year; however, we will be much more organized on who we talk to and why. We know what we will invest in and what we feel is interesting. Hopefully, this approach will yield better results in our sourcing efforts.