Sellers are paid and working capital has hit the bank. Finally closed on my first acquisition. Quite a journey to get to this phase, but excited for the next step. It's a PR (public relations) business here in Boston, 20 years old with 7 employees. I know I haven't joined a lot of the calls and be super active in the group recently, but can attribute a lot of the mindset and approach that I used throughout the search process to various people in this group, so just want to say a quick thank you!

Trying to find your first business, build an off-market deal pipeline, and manage complex due diligence notes by relying on scattered spreadsheets, loose text files, and random folders is an absolute roadblock. When you're trying to execute a 90-day search strategy, negotiate LOIs, and handle financial models without a centralized setup, letting your broker communications and deal documents get buried across a chaotic maze of open browser tabs and phone memos makes closing deals nearly impossible. Securing your first acquisition means ditching the digital clutter and anchoring your search into a clean, systematic framework. Instead of juggling random files, I now rely on a centralized Notion and spreadsheet ecosystem to track my off-market leads, financial models, and deal team milestones without the mental noise, paired with tool integration links like claude.ai and canva.com to support my acquisition pipeline. Whenever I need to break down a tricky purchase agreement or structure a new outreach sequence, I drop my rough thoughts into floment.ai and instantly get three targeted variation options and negotiation frameworks in seconds flat. What major wins, deal milestones, or search breakthroughs are you celebrating inside Searcher School right now?

Quick background: I run a premium online tutoring business for high school students. We hold a sales call with every lead, and send them an email and text summarising the conversation with the link to purchase their first package. We heavily customise the email to reflect their specific goals. The win: a Claude skill now goes to a google sheet with my call notes, finds the customer I just spoke to and customises the email template to their gender, position (student/parent), subject, and even their goals, and leaves the draft in my inbox with addressee, subject and body complete. It also displays the SMS text for me to copy and send in my text system. Relevance: I'm sure you can imagine if you are holding calls with sellers, this allows you to genuinely reflect your conversation in a personalised email and text without you having to reinvent the wheel every time. Just take the notes once during the call and get Claude to do your writing for you. Time saved: 10-15 minutes per email and text pair sent.

Hi all! Just want to share some good news. My wife and I finally closed on our first business last week. It's a psychotherapy business (Puget sound psychotherapy). I want to thank this group for help with my 12.00am questions and being just a text away! Glad to be part of such an awesome group!

I've been attending Jed's sessions on using Claude for search and had a quick win this morning. I own and operate one small business while also doing some consulting and searching for acquisitions under another. The end result I needed was summarised, archived newsletters; real human issues highlighted to me; replies drafted with knowledge of my business; and a report, whenever I run the command, that summarises both inboxes as part of my morning routine. It took about 40 minutes of thinking and back-and-forth with Claude to get the result I wanted. Anything I star is kept in the inbox. Anything not starred is archived on the next pass. This might help others trying to manage multiple inboxes and focus on what matters. Let me know if this was helpful, or feel free to critique the idea! Pre-requisites: 1. Claude Code on your desktop or another environment like Antigravity IDE 2. Claude understands your business/es (ask it!) 3. Claude connected to all gmail inboxes you want it to manage (ask it how!) Set it up with copy and paste: Copy the message below, replace the bits in [brackets] with your own details in plain English, and paste the whole thing into Claude. It'll do the setup for you and create a /email command you can run each morning. You won't touch a file. _____ I want a daily email routine, and a /email command I can type to run it. Please do all the setup yourself so I don't have to create any files. MY DETAILS - Businesses and inboxes to cover: [e.g. Acme ([email protected]) and Beta ([email protected])] - A shared/team inbox I'm cc'd on but don't personally answer: [e.g. [email protected]] - My booking link and default meeting length: [e.g. calendly.com/me, 30 minutes] - My writing voice in a few words: [e.g. warm, direct, short sentences, no em dashes] - Newsletters I want KEPT in my inbox (archive all other newsletters): [e.g. none, or name a couple] - Newsletters to file but NOT mention in the summary: [e.g. none] - Tags for sorting threads: [e.g. Customers, Vendors, Applicants]