Poland M&A Outreach (25+ Owner Meetings)

About the Client:

A Nordic private equity fund operating a multi-country portfolio of healthcare distribution companies across the Nordics, DACH, Benelux, and CEE. The fund's thesis: enter the Polish market by acquiring established local distributors in a specific niche of healthcare distribution, with revenue above EUR 3M and near-exclusive vertical focus.

Client's Challenges:

• Map a tightly held Polish vertical with fewer than 100 companies meeting the fund's criteria, most invisible to global B2B databases like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo.
• Identify and reach founder-owners of family businesses who operate exclusively in Polish, many without LinkedIn profiles or public contact details.
• Hold acquisition conversations in Polish, with the right business culture and patience around family-business decision tempo.
• Verify revenue and vertical focus of each target from Polish-language sources global platforms don't cover.

Solutions and Key Takeaways:

• Translated the fund's investment thesis into operational targeting criteria, then built the target universe of 300+ companies from Polish-specific sources: KRS, GUS, industry trade publications, and direct scraping of vertical directories.
• Enriched every company with verified revenue band, ownership structure, share of revenue from the target niche, and succession signals from corporate filings.
• Applied the fund's filters (EUR 3M+ revenue, ~99% vertical focus), narrowing 300+ companies to 115, then to 65 qualified targets with full owner identification and contact paths.
• Ran Polish-language cold calling first, with email and LinkedIn as supporting channels, led by a senior operator on a patience-first cadence; one owner required 12 callbacks over six weeks before agreeing.
• Framed meetings as 30-minute strategic explorations without commitment, booked directly into the fund's calendar with per-target briefs attached, with real-time Polish-to-English interpreting and post-meeting Polish correspondence handled by the delivery team.
• Booked 25+ qualified owner meetings with Polish founders in 3 months, with the trajectory pointing to 30-35 meetings before close.
• Achieved a ~40% conversion from qualified target to booked meeting, significantly above baseline for Polish family-business owners.
• Built the fund's true addressable acquisition universe: 65 fit targets in a vertical it initially assumed was unreachable through cold outreach.
• Moved the fund from "is this market addressable" to sequencing the next wave; by month three the engagement expanded to on-site Polish partnership at in-person meetings.
• Five companies progressed to advanced strategic discussions with the fund's investment team.

Performance:

• Companies mapped: 300+
• Qualified targets: 65
• Qualified owner meetings booked: 25+ in 3 months (campaign ongoing)
• Qualified-target-to-meeting conversion: ~40%
• Targets in active next-step discussions: 5
• Channels: Polish-language cold calling, email, LinkedIn
• Market: Poland
• Engagement: 3 months active, campaign ongoing, trajectory 30-35 meetings before close
• Service: M&A Outreach & Acquisition Target Mapping