The hidden key to wealth: building powerful deal flow

Ten million dollars, or a pipeline of the best investment opportunities in the world. Which would you take? Most people grab the money without thinking twice, and after a decade in this business I can tell you that's a mistake. Money is everywhere. Look around: private equity firms sitting on record dry powder, family offices with more cash than they know what to do with. What's actually rare is access to deals that move the needle.

I learned that the hard way. After my first exit I thought I had it figured out: strategy, capital, ambition. And I kept hitting the same wall, hearing about every great deal months too late, after the real money had already been made. The one that finally taught me was a prime development near a major university: best-in-class sponsor, the whole package, my capital ready. I never got the chance to bid, because the deal was locked up through a private network before it publicly existed. That's when it landed. The wealthy aren't rich because they're better at analyzing deals. They're rich because they see deals nobody else gets to see. So I stopped optimizing capital and strategy and started building the thing that actually mattered: a system for access. That's why Infinity⁹ exists.

Being valuable, not being everywhere

When most people hear deal flow they picture volume, lots of options. That misses the point entirely. Real deal flow is about the right options: pre-vetted, strategically sound, aligned with what you're actually trying to build.

My first real breakthrough was small: a forty-two unit value-add project in St. Louis. Instead of just trying to write a check, I spent weeks studying that local market, everything from traffic patterns to upcoming developments, and I brought the sponsor insights they hadn't considered. The check wasn't large. But it got me invited to the next deal, and the next. Each time I wasn't only investing, I was adding something: analysis, a connection, a solved problem. And at some point the direction reversed. I stopped chasing deals and they started arriving. Within two years we went from struggling to see good opportunities to having our pick of them. The lesson underneath it is one sentence: it's not about being everywhere, it's about being valuable wherever you are.

Real deal flow stands on three pillars, and missing one makes the whole structure shaky. The first is expertise, and specifically narrow expertise. We didn't try to be everything to everyone; we focused exclusively on value-add real estate, where we could genuinely see what others missed. That's how you spot an overlooked suburb because your own data shows a demographic shift driven by companies relocating offices, rather than reading about it in a broker's flyer six months later.

The second is strategic relationships, and notice the adjective. Most people think networking means collecting business cards or adding connections. Strategic relationships mean becoming genuinely valuable to a small group of partners whose goals align with yours. We spent three years building a relationship with one of the top developers in Nevada, starting small: sharing market research, making introductions, adding value wherever we could. Today they bring us deals before anyone else, because they know we understand their business and can move quickly.

The third is systems, and it's the least glamorous and most decisive: you can't scale what you can't systematize. Every deal we look at goes through the same process, market analysis, sponsor evaluation, risk assessment, and that discipline is precisely what lets us move fast when the right thing appears. Speed isn't recklessness when the framework is already built.

The credibility gap

Then we hit a wall I didn't expect. Our conversion rate was low; we were burning time on opportunities that went nowhere. We had the relationships to see deals, and we hadn't built enough trust for people to choose us. That's the credibility gap, and it's a different problem from access entirely. So we made a radical change: instead of trying to be in every deal, we became the absolute best at one specific type of transaction. The conversion rate tripled almost immediately, for a simple reason. When you speak to someone's exact need, they stop seeing you as another option and start seeing you as their solution.

Two habits closed the rest of the gap, and neither costs money. We built a process that gives sponsors a clear yes or no within five days, when most investors take weeks. And when we passed, we sent a detailed written explanation of why, which took extra time and showed the sponsor we respected their work enough to think hard about it. That combination, speed and a good no, made us the call people made first.

None of this requires institutional scale. One investor I know tracked a single unglamorous signal: high-end restaurant openings in three neighborhoods. He understood that restaurants don't open randomly, they follow demographic shifts, and within a year he'd identified two emerging corridors before they appeared on any broker's radar, buying at pre-growth prices. That's the whole thesis in miniature: technology and data help, but when everyone has the same data, what separates you is what you do with it and who takes your call.

What you bring that isn't money

This is what the runtime didn't get to teach, and I add it here as the extended class. If capital is commoditized, then every time a sponsor lets you into a deal they're choosing you over other money, and it's worth asking honestly: why would they? Here is what actually decides it, in the order sponsors care about.

First, certainty. Speed is a product, and a stated clock is the version of it people trust: I will give you a yes or no within five business days, and here is what I need to do it. A fast no is worth more to a sponsor than a slow maybe, because their scarcest resource isn't capital either, it's time before a closing date.

Second, the quality of your no. Anyone can decline. Almost nobody explains. A written page saying what you liked, what stopped you, and what would change your answer costs you an hour and buys you the next call, because you've just done the one thing that proves you actually read their work.

Third, unrequested value delivered before you're in the deal. A market data point, an introduction to a lender, a tenant lead, a contractor reference. One genuinely useful thing per quarter, sent to five relationships that matter, will out-produce a thousand connections. This is what the St. Louis deal really was: research given away before anyone owed me anything.

Fourth, being easy to close with. Clean documents, no re-trading after terms are agreed, no committee surprises at the last minute. A reputation for not renegotiating is worth more than a higher number, because the sponsor is pricing the probability that you actually show up.

Then pick your slot and make it narrow enough to be memorable, one asset type, one range, one geography, so that when that exact thing crosses someone's desk your name arrives with it. And measure the only metric that matters here: your inbound rate, the number of quality opportunities that reach you each quarter without you asking. Revenue is a lagging indicator of deal flow. Inbound is the leading one, and if it isn't rising year over year, you're still shopping rather than being sought.

The mirror

When I started I was the outsider looking in, frustrated at the lack of access. Today we see more opportunities than we can act on, and the difference was never being the biggest or the richest. It was being systematic, focused, and patient enough to build something durable. So take one idea from this and do it this week: define the three signals you'll track, study the top brokers in your market without pitching them, or write down the exact combination of conditions that will make you move, so the decision isn't made by emotion later.

So here's the question in front of the mirror: how many real opportunities came to you last quarter without you asking for them? That number, not your capital, is your actual position in this business. The best opportunities don't go to the biggest players. They go to the most prepared.

If you want to keep this conversation going each week, there is The Sunday Memo. Because everyone in this industry started exactly where you are. The only difference is that they started.

Founder of Infinity⁹. Here I write in my own voice.