Ten-week core cohort led by Searchfunder co-founder Karen Spencer adds a live proprietary search, with fellows building buy boxes, contacting real business owners and working alongside acquisition entrepreneurs Kevin Hong and Hereford Johnson to evaluate live deals in the classroom
LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESS Newswire / September 8, 2026 / Fetch Strategies and Caprae Capital today announced a partnership to bring live, experiential deal sourcing into the ETA Hub, Fetch Strategies’ full-cycle program for aspiring and active acquisition entrepreneurs. The Hub begins with a six-session cohort over about ten-weeks and continues with support throughout the search journey and transition into the CEO role.
Led by Fetch Strategies founder and Searchfunder.com co-founder Karen Spencer, ETA Hub is designed to prepare aspiring buyers for the realities of entrepreneurship through acquisition, from defining an acquisition thesis and evaluating opportunities to navigating diligence, negotiations, financing, ownership and the transition into the CEO seat. The Hub combines live cohort sessions, data-informed feedback, peer discussion, targeted mentor support, Searcher Circles, Deal Huddles and proprietary tools such as VAULT and ETA PitchRef to help fellows build judgment, credibility and traction as their searches develop.
Under the new partnership, Caprae Capital will add a hands-on sourcing layer to that curriculum, giving fellows the opportunity to move beyond classroom exercises and conduct an actual off-market search during the program.
Caprae brings a sourcing operation that has completed more than half a million human cold calls since inception, including more than 10,000 human-dialed calls per week to date.
That scale has given the firm a growing body of proprietary operating data around not just what to say, but when to call, which industries generate stronger seller engagement, how many touches tend to be required, how follow-up cadence affects conversion and what outreach patterns are most likely to progress toward serious seller conversations and ultimately LOIs.
The partnership is designed to translate that accumulated pattern recognition directly into the classroom.
Rather than learning cold outreach through generic scripts or hypothetical case studies, each fellow will develop a personalized buy box, receive a curated list of approximately 60 verified acquisition targets, build a founder-specific outreach narrative, and participate in live calling sessions alongside Caprae’s sourcing team.
The goal is to allow participants to experience the mechanics of proprietary deal sourcing while they are still inside the initial six-session cohort, with mentors helping them adjust messaging, targeting and strategy in real time.
A Live Search Built Into the Cohort Curriculum
The partnership expands ETA Hub from a practicum centered on fellows’ independent outreach through guided exercises to a more fully supported experience that includes structured sourcing support, individualized preparation and side-by-side coaching during their initial conversations with business owners.
The sourcing curriculum unfolds alongside the existing ETA Hub calendar.
Each participant begins by defining a search thesis across factors such as industry, geography, company size and owner profile. Caprae then conducts a dedicated positioning and messaging interview with each fellow before developing an individualized outreach approach grounded in the buyer’s own story, strategy and voice-not a standardized intermediary script.
Caprae then builds and verifies a prospect list around that buy box, appends contact information, screens for reachable owners and prepares the cohort for live outreach.
The program culminates in four 90-minute live cold-calling sessions, beginning October 31, during which participants dial real business owners with the Caprae team and receive coaching while the search is happening.
What makes the format different is what happens next.
As conversations turn into real acquisition opportunities, those deals can be brought directly back into the ETA Hub classroom.
Fellows and mentors will dissect live deals together, work through valuation, seller motivation, diligence questions, financing considerations, risks and next steps, and then continue developing those opportunities while the cohort experience is still underway.
In practical terms, the curriculum becomes a live loop:
build the thesis → identify owners → contact them → generate conversations → bring opportunities into the classroom → dissect the deal → refine the thesis → pursue the strongest opportunities.
The fellows are not merely studying what a search might look like.
They are conducting one.
Learning From Searchers Who Have Actually Done It
A central part of the partnership is the background of the operators teaching the sourcing component.
Kevin Hong, Founder of Caprae Capital, has experience as a founder, traditional searcher and self-funded acquisition entrepreneur, with experience spanning sourcing, acquisition, operating companies after close and navigating the realities of ownership beyond the transaction itself.
Hereford Johnson, Founder at Caprae Capital, brings a similarly broad background as a founder, traditional searcher and self-funded searcher, having acquired and operated a business before applying that experience to advising other buyers.
That distinction matters.
The sourcing curriculum is not being taught purely by consultants or sales trainers. It is being taught by people who have sat on the same side of the table as the fellows, trying to identify the right company, earn the trust of a seller, structure a deal and then live with the operating consequences after closing.
Caprae’s broader Search as a Service platform already supports traditional and self-funded searchers across the sourcing, deal execution and post-close process, including lead generation, calling, outreach, financial modeling, diligence, structuring and post-acquisition planning.
More Than Half a Million Calls Become a Classroom
One of the biggest advantages Caprae brings to the program is volume.
After more than half a million human cold calls, the firm has accumulated a large body of real-world sourcing experience across industries, geographies and different types of acquisition mandates.
That creates pattern recognition that is difficult to develop from a handful of searches.
Caprae has built operating knowledge around questions such as:
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What days and times are more likely to produce owner conversations
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Which industries tend to respond more favorably to direct outreach
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How many attempts are typically required before a serious conversation develops
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When a follow-up cadence becomes too aggressive or too weak
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Which opening messages create curiosity versus immediate resistance
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How seller engagement evolves from first contact through follow-up
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Which behaviors tend to appear in searches that ultimately produce serious opportunities and LOIs
“Pattern recognition has always been at the heart of ETA Hub,” said Karen Spencer, founder of Fetch Strategies. “I started the Hub because searchers were repeatedly learning lessons that other searchers had learned years earlier. Our goal is to help fellows reduce avoidable errors by giving them ready access to hard-won experience and data that would otherwise take years to develop. Kevin and Hereford bring that same accumulated learning to the sourcing process. The program exposes fellows to that data while simultaneously letting them build up their own experience.”
Participants will not only hear what works.
They will be able to see how their own outreach compares with a much larger pool of real-world calls and seller interactions.
The objective is not to turn fellows into professional cold callers.
It is to teach them enough about proprietary sourcing to understand how an effective search engine actually behaves, how to manage one, how to diagnose underperformance and how to recognize when a promising seller conversation deserves more attention.
How the Curriculum Plays Out
The sourcing component is structured to build progressively through the cohort rather than appear as a standalone lecture.
Early sessions focus on the search thesis: what kind of business the fellow actually wants to own, where it should be located, what size it should be and what characteristics make an owner worth contacting.
Caprae then translates that thesis into a prospect universe.
Each fellow receives approximately 60 verified prospects, including appended mobile and email data. Caprae’s team screens the universe, prepares individualized messaging and tests the outreach before live dialing begins.
Kevin Hong will teach directly into ETA Hub’s sourcing and outreach sessions with the live call blocks integrated into the existing program calendar.
As owners respond and viable targets emerge, selected opportunities may be anonymized and brought back into the classroom for discussion and live deal work.
That creates something closer to the actual search experience than a typical lecture format: participants can hear what an owner says, examine the business, debate whether the opportunity fits their buy box, determine what diligence needs to happen next and then continue pursuing the opportunity.
Why Proprietary Deal Flow Matters
For acquisition entrepreneurs, sourcing is one of the few parts of the transaction process where effort can directly create an informational and economic advantage.
Off-market acquisitions are commonly estimated by practitioners to transact at materially lower multiples than broadly marketed or brokered deals, often with estimates in the range of roughly 0.5x to 1.5x lower entry multiples, depending on industry, deal size and competitive dynamics.
The reasons are structural.
A brokered business is intentionally marketed to multiple buyers. The company has usually been packaged for sale, financial adjustments have been prepared, and the seller’s expectations around valuation may have already become anchored.
A proprietary opportunity starts differently.
The buyer often reaches an owner before a formal sale process exists. There may be no auction, no competing stack of letters of intent and no intermediary controlling access.
That does not mean every proprietary deal is automatically inexpensive or attractive.
It does mean buyers have the opportunity to establish a relationship before competition forms, learn about a company directly from the owner and potentially tailor a transaction around the seller’s actual objectives.
The tradeoff is time.
Some of the best proprietary opportunities develop over many months, which makes disciplined follow-up and consistent sourcing particularly important for first-time buyers.
Karen Spencer and the ETA Hub
Karen Spencer co-founded Searchfunder.com, one of the largest online communities dedicated to entrepreneurship through acquisition, with roughly 35,000 members.
Across the ETA ecosystem, she has become known for helping prospective searchers understand not merely how to acquire a business, but what the path actually requires at every stage.
Karen is the author of the ETA Guidebook and creator of programs including the VAULT digital video channel and the Challenge Point CEO Roundtable.
She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.S. in Management from Stanford University and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from MIT. She is also a registered patent attorney and a member of the California and Oregon bars.
The ETA Hub builds on that experience by giving acquisition entrepreneurs a structured environment in which to pressure-test their thesis before placing their own capital, careers and reputations behind an acquisition.
The Caprae partnership adds another dimension: letting fellows pressure-test that thesis against actual business owners and then work through the resulting opportunities live with their mentors.
“I work with our fellows to develop the right mix of brokered and proprietary sourcing based on their circumstances and their industry thesis. I’ve repeatedly found that even experienced searchers can have trouble executing on their sourcing strategy,” said Karen Spencer, Founder of Fetch Strategies. “The value of this partnership is that our fellows will not simply hear a talk about sourcing. They will build a buy box, develop their own message, call real owners with mentoring support and learn from the responses.”
“A search changes the moment an actual owner picks up the phone,” Spencer added. “You very quickly discover whether your thesis, your story and your approach make sense.”
Kevin Hong, Founder of Caprae Capital, said the collaboration is intended to expose participants to the pattern recognition Caprae has accumulated by running searches at scale.
“After more than half a million human calls, you start to see patterns that are almost invisible when you are running your first search,” Hong said. “You learn when owners tend to answer, how different industries behave, what follow-up cadence keeps a conversation alive and which signals suggest a seller is moving toward a real process. We want fellows to learn from that dataset while building their own.”
Hong said the ability to learn directly from people who have gone through multiple versions of the acquisition path themselves is equally important.
“Hereford and I have both been founders, traditional searchers and self-funded searchers. We know what it feels like when the search stops being theoretical and there is a real owner, a real company and eventually a real operating responsibility on the other side of the transaction. That is the perspective we want to bring into the classroom.”
A Pilot Designed for a Longer-Term Collaboration
The Fall 2026 cohort will serve as the first implementation of the expanded sourcing curriculum, with the first live calling sessions scheduled to begin October 31.
The sourcing collaboration is being introduced as an initial pilot within the existing ETA Hub structure, with the intention of refining the model based on participant outcomes and continuing the collaboration across future cohorts. “I’m very excited about this pilot and am looking forward to supporting a broader collaboration,” said Karen Spencer.
Under the broader collaboration, Karen Spencer will serve as a strategic advisor to Caprae, participating in webinars and office hours, while selected Fetch Strategies educational content will be made available to Caprae members.
About Fetch Strategies
Fetch Strategies helps aspiring and active acquisition entrepreneurs prepare for the process of searching for, acquiring and operating small and lower-middle-market businesses.
Its ETA Hub is a full-cycle program that begins with a structured six-session cohort and continues with ongoing support throughout the search journey until the buyer has successfully transitioned into their CEO role. It combines structured education, peer learning and practitioner guidance across the acquisition journey, helping participants move from an initial interest in entrepreneurship through acquisition toward a disciplined, executable search strategy and transitioning into their CEO role.
The program is led by Karen Spencer, a co-founder of Searchfunder.com and one of the ETA ecosystem’s longest-standing educators and community builders.
About Caprae Capital
Caprae Capital is a next-generation M&A platform supporting acquisition entrepreneurs across the full lifecycle of a transaction, from proprietary sourcing through diligence, closing and post-acquisition strategy.
Through its Search as a Service platform, Caprae provides lead generation, human cold calling, customized outreach, financial modeling, market research, diligence support, deal structuring and post-close operating guidance.
Since launch, Caprae has helped its members close more than $150 million in deal value, while building a sourcing engine that has completed more than half a million human cold calls and currently places more than 10,000 human-dialed calls per week.
The firm serves acquisition entrepreneurs across multiple countries and is founder-led and operator-driven, with acquisition entrepreneurs and former operators working directly with buyers throughout the search and transaction process.
Contact Information
Zackary Beckham
zackary@capraecapital.com
480-518-2592
SOURCE: Caprae Capital
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