How a private credit fund sourced $300M in deal volume

Where they started

Before last year, the fund's origination ran the way it does at most funds without a dedicated outbound motion: deals arrived from people they already knew, and from co-investors who happened to pass something along. That inbound is real, reliable deal flow. However, it means you have fewer choices than you'd have in a perfect world.

The person who runs origination there wanted a pipeline she originated herself. A short list puts pressure on every deal, good or bad, because there isn't another one behind it. Originating her own pipeline meant she could turn deals down. That is what changed the terms. Not more deals walking in. The ability to say no.

Origination was already a known bottleneck. The first idea was to hire someone who had done it. Hiring takes time, so she volunteered. She went to her partner, told him she knew it was a problem, that she would step into the role, and that she was confident she could solve it regardless of what it took.

Finding the real targets

The Apero team sat with her and figured out who was actually worth writing. They started on LinkedIn: Sales Navigator plus a connection tool, used to book intro calls. It worked well enough. Hospital CFOs, the people the fund would lend to, barely use LinkedIn and don't read cold email. Investment bankers do reply, because they live in deal flow. That made them a useful first channel. Those conversations opened relationships outside that list. Once the targeting was obvious, they dropped the heavier LinkedIn stack and wrote the people who would actually answer.

The other half was a conference list that's first name, last name, company, title. Apero showed her how to turn that into whether the person is a fit, what their email is, what their LinkedIn is, and who she already knows in common. Clay, then Deepline, were the tools. "Michael Slawson taught me how to use the GTM engineering tools to identify if this person can be a good fit for us, what their email address is, what their LinkedIn is, and where the overlap is with our own network."

She is direct about what the engagement was. "It was less of a system, but more of a way of thinking. A lot of it was really a way of thinking versus a particular system or SOP."

Dedicated people and dedicated time

The formal engagement ended, and origination sat next to everything else on her plate for a while. The aha moment happened at a company offsite. The Apero team came back in, and the rest of the fund decided origination needed dedicated people and dedicated time. With that, and with the targeting already proven, they ran a real outbound campaign.

Reply rate landed around 35%. They did look at turning this into a more automated system. It didn't make sense. When you have such a high hit rate, and can pick what shots you want to take on goal, blasting a list isn't necessary. Automating that would have risked the trust she was earning with people who might send her deals for years. The Apero team's advice at one point was to leave the reply rate alone: "You have a 40 percent reply rate. These relationships are worth using at least for a much longer period than probably would have felt like it should make sense for a GTM thing. Just keep writing good emails." Some automation did show up down the line when they were truly confident they wouldn't be sacrificing brand equity to do it. She'll tell you handwritten email still wins.

Results

1. Around 35% reply rate on the outbound campaign
2. ~150 new industry relationships
3. More than $300M in deal volume that year attributable to the outbound motion
4. Origination off the worry list

A year in, origination is stable enough that it has dropped off the worry list. Of the deal volume that moved through the fund in that year, more than $300M is attributable to the outbound motion they built. "The origination has never been a pain point that we've been talking about. We're talking about expansion, we're talking about further developing a thesis. But the backbone of origination right now is pretty stable."

The network compounds in a way a single deal doesn't. She went from close to zero LinkedIn connections in her space to running into two or three mutual connections wherever she shows up now, sometimes closer to twenty. Some of those people send her deals without being asked, because she's become one of the people they think of first for a given deal type. The relationships did not stay inside the first channel they wrote.

"I've seen other fund managers become the go-to source for a particular category just by staying visible on LinkedIn. Whenever there's a deal for a specialty clinic, or GPU financing, people think of them."

The same identify-and-reach-out method has since been used to source a private wealth advisor hire and to evaluate accounting firms. "It's a playbook you can take wherever you go, at whatever initiative the business wants to move forward with."

What she'd tell another fund

"Proactive outreach is a grossly underestimated capability for an origination team. It's comfortable to sit and let warm relationships bring you deals. But high quality followers, you have to go find yourself."

Her main advice is to expect the work to feel useless before it feels like proof, and to set the checkpoint far enough out that a slow start doesn't get read as failure. "You have to be really patient and trust the process. Set some metrics around it. Send a thousand emails and then review, versus sending twenty and calling it a failure after zero replies."