40 Expert Calls in 8 Days: How a Mid-Market PE Fund Got the Answers It Needed With 15 Minutes of Work

A mid-market private equity fund was evaluating an acquisition target in the fire security and CCTV installation sector. The deal was moving. The investment committee meeting was on the calendar. And the team had a problem they couldn't solve from a spreadsheet.

The target looked strong on paper. Recurring revenue from maintenance contracts. A fragmented market with consolidation potential. Steady margins. But the numbers couldn't answer the questions that mattered most. How sticky were the customer relationships really? Were competitors undercutting on price to win installation contracts? Was the shift to IP-based CCTV systems changing the economics of the service model? And could this business actually scale beyond its current geography without the margins compressing?

The fund's existing expert network quoted three weeks to source and schedule relevant calls. The IC meeting was in ten days.

They came to Woozle.

The Brief

The entire engagement started with a single 15-minute call. The deal team walked us through their thesis, the target's market position, and the five or six questions they needed answered before they could get comfortable with the investment case.

That was their total time commitment. Fifteen minutes.

Our equity analysts took the brief and built out the research scope. The thesis drivers were clear: customer retention dynamics in commercial fire and security contracts, competitive pricing behaviour among regional installers, the margin impact of the technology transition from analogue to IP-based systems, and the operational complexity of geographic expansion in a sector where local relationships and regulatory accreditation matter.

We identified the expert profiles that would give the fund the most useful perspective. Not generic "industry experts." Specific people. Branch managers at competing regional fire and security installers. Former commercial customers who had recently switched providers. Procurement leads at facilities management companies who commission this work. Technical directors who had overseen the transition from legacy analogue systems to IP-based CCTV. And former employees of the target itself who could speak to operational strengths and weaknesses from the inside.

The Execution

Over the next eight days, our team sourced, vetted, scheduled, moderated, and delivered 40 expert calls.

Every call was moderated by a Woozle equity analyst who understood the deal thesis. They knew what mattered. They knew which threads to pull on and which to leave alone. They knew how to push past the surface-level commentary that fills most expert calls and get to the operational detail that actually informs an investment decision.

The deal team did not schedule a single call. They did not prepare a single question sheet. They did not sit on a single hour-long conversation trying to steer an unfocused discussion toward something useful. They gave us fifteen minutes and got back a body of primary research that would have taken their team weeks to assemble on their own.

What the Research Revealed

The 40 calls produced a set of findings that fundamentally shaped the fund's view of the target.

Customer retention was stronger than the fund had assumed, but for a specific reason that wasn't visible in the financials. Fire security maintenance contracts are driven by regulatory compliance. Buildings need annual inspections and certifications. Switching providers means re-certifying systems, retraining facilities teams, and risking gaps in compliance coverage. Several facility managers told our analysts they would tolerate meaningful price increases before they would switch, simply because the cost of transition outweighed the savings. That stickiness was real, but it was regulatory, not relational. It would hold as long as compliance requirements stayed in place.

Competitive pricing was more aggressive than expected in new installation work, but less of a threat in the recurring maintenance base. Regional competitors were willing to underbid significantly on initial installation contracts to win the ongoing maintenance revenue. This was compressing margins on new business but leaving the existing book largely intact. The fund's model had assumed stable installation margins. The research suggested they needed to adjust.

The IP-based CCTV transition was creating a bifurcation in the market. Installers who had invested in training and certification for IP systems were winning higher-margin contracts with larger commercial clients. Those who hadn't were being pushed toward smaller, lower-value work. The target was on the right side of this divide, but the capex required to stay there was higher than the fund had modelled.

And geographic expansion was possible but harder than a simple bolt-on playbook suggested. Fire security installation is heavily regulated at the local level. Accreditations, inspector relationships, and regional building codes vary significantly. Several former branch managers at competing firms described failed expansion attempts where national firms had underestimated the importance of local knowledge and regulatory familiarity.

The Deliverable

The fund received the full output within the eight-day window. Transcripts from all 40 calls. A synthesis report written by our analysts highlighting the key findings, the implications for the investment thesis, and the specific areas where the original model assumptions needed revising. And direct access to our research team for follow-up questions.

The deal team walked into their IC meeting with primary research that had been sourced, conducted, moderated, and synthesised by someone else. They had not spent weeks buried in expert network logistics. They had spent fifteen minutes on a brief and received a body of work that gave them genuine confidence in their view of the target.

What This Looks Like in Practice

This is what the shift from access to outcomes actually means when it meets a live deal.

A traditional expert network would have taken three weeks to source and schedule the calls. The deal team would have spent dozens of hours preparing question guides, sitting on calls, and trying to extract useful insight from conversations they were moderating themselves. Some of those calls would have been useful. Many would not. And the synthesis work, pulling the threads together into a coherent view, would have fallen on analysts who were simultaneously working on three other deals.

The Woozle model compressed that entire process into eight days and fifteen minutes of the client's time. Not because we cut corners. Because the process is designed differently. When trained analysts moderate every call, the hit rate goes up. When the research scope is built around a specific thesis, every conversation is focused. When the provider owns the synthesis, the client gets an answer, not a stack of transcripts to process.

Forty calls. Eight days. Fifteen minutes.

That is what primary research looks like when someone else owns the process.