Key Takeaways

  • Brogan Magnarelli, Principal at Riverspan Partners, credits her early career growth to openly asking basic questions rather than pretending to possess instant private equity fluency.
  • Sourcing founder-owned companies breaks down when deal professionals posture as operational experts instead of acknowledging that the owner knows the business best.
  • Magnarelli argues that guarding business development playbooks is unnecessary because deal origination advantages stem from execution discipline, not proprietary secret formulas.
  • Sourcing industrial assets requires entering founder meetings with genuine curiosity, positioning the investor as a capital partner ready to learn rather than an operational authority.

Asking the Questions That Keep You Up at Night

When Brogan Magnarelli stepped into private equity business development at Riverspan Partners after working as a tech product manager and playing point guard at Harvard, she took an unconventional approach to the industry's posture problem. Most junior professionals project unearned command. Magnarelli did the opposite.

“So, when I first joined private equity, oh my god, I asked so many dumb questions,” Magnarelli recalls. “Like questions that literally keep me up at night being like, 'Oh, I'm so embarrassed that I asked those.'”

That willingness to look uninformed early on accomplished two things. It compressed her learning curve by stripping out the delay of pretending to understand complex deal mechanics. It also kept her in rooms where she was stretched. As Magnarelli puts it: “If you find yourself to be the smartest person in a room, you need to find another room.” In an industry obsessed with credentials, treating ignorance as a temporary data gap rather than a reputation threat changes how quickly a dealmaker builds actual competence.

Why Process Secrecy in Deal Sourcing Is an Illusion

Private equity business development professionals often guard their outreach workflows, CRM configurations, and outbound sequencing as if they were proprietary intellectual property. Magnarelli rejects that scarcity mindset entirely.

“I come with the train of thought that I don't think what I'm doing is extraordinarily proprietary,” Magnarelli says. “I work hard at it. So I think if I share my process methodology, I don't think it's going to disadvantage me in the competitive market.”

Her logic is direct: the advantage in deal origination is not the template. It is the stamina to run the process every single week without dropping volume or quality. Sharing tactics across peer networks builds relationship capital with other sponsors and intermediaries without diluting deal flow, because competitors rarely match the operational discipline required to execute the workflow consistently.

Why Founders Reject the Smartest Person in the Room

The traditional institutional pitch deck is designed to prove that the private equity firm knows the target company's industry better than anyone else. In the lower-middle market, particularly with founder-owned industrial companies, that posture frequently kills deals before due diligence even starts.

Founders who spent thirty years building a specialized manufacturing or distribution business immediately spot when an investor is reading from canned research decks. Cass points out the friction this creates during initial founder outreach: “When you are in a room with a founder, with somebody who's running a business, you don't know their business like they know their business. Coming at that conversation with the humility of 'you know more than I do, I would love to learn from you about it' changes everything.”

Magnarelli notes that “you rarely want to be the smartest person in a room.” When engaging founders who are considering their first institutional capital partner, curiosity beats authority. The investor who asks thoughtful questions and lets the founder teach them earns trust that polished presentations cannot buy.

Why It Matters

Lower-middle market deal flow is consolidating around relationship-driven sourcing as proprietary asset supply tightens. As aging industrial founders evaluate succession options, sponsors who replace didactic pitch decks with authentic operational curiosity win bilateral exclusivity over firms trying to project superior operational knowledge.