Designing the System Behind 100+ Small Business Acquisitions

A lead management platform that powered sourcing, evaluation, and tracking across Teamshares’ growing deal pipeline.

Background

Teamshares helped small businesses transition to employee ownership by acquiring companies from retiring founders. The company supported these businesses with financial tools and enabled employees to gradually become part-owners, building long-term stability and economic resilience.

The Problem

To meet its goal of acquiring thousands of small businesses, Teamshares needed a better way to source, track, and manage acquisition leads. The process was manual and fragmented, making it difficult to scale efficiently.

The Opportunity

There was a clear opportunity to automate sourcing, centralize data, and streamline collaboration across teams like due diligence and legal.

The Solution

As the founding product designer, I led the design of an internal acquisition management tool that became the backbone of our sourcing pipeline.

It automatically pulled listings from small business marketplaces and converted them into structured leads.
Leads were tracked across pipeline stages, enriched with details like correspondence history, financials, and deal terms.
Once a deal closed, the tool fed structured data to downstream systems to support onboarding and ownership transfer.
It also aggregated insights over time, creating industry benchmarks that helped us evaluate deals more effectively.

My Role

I was responsible for the initial design vision, and later managed a team of two designers. We split ownership across the acquisition funnel and collaborated with stakeholders including the C-suite, due diligence, and legal teams to ensure the tool met real-world needs.

Outcome

The tool evaluated tens of thousands of businesses and became mission-critical to the Transaction Team. It enabled millions of dollars in closed deals and gave Teamshares the infrastructure to scale acquisitions efficiently and intelligently.