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 enables small businesses to transition to employee ownership. Teamshares buys businesses from retiring owners, grants the employees a percentage, and employees then buy the business from teamshares through dividends.


Problem

Our acquisition workflow was manual and fragmented. Leads lived across listing sites, spreadsheets, inboxes, and Slack threads. The result was:

  • Sourcing was time-consuming and inconsistent

  • Data was incomplete, duplicated, or hard to trust

  • Deal context was buried in comments and DMs

  • Hand-offs between transactions, diligence, and legal were messy

  • Leadership visibility into funnel health was limited

If Teamshares wanted to acquire thousands of businesses without scaling the team linearly, they would need infrastructure.

Solution

As the first product designer, I led the design of an internal lead management platform that could:

  • Automate the top of funnel (automated communication and financial assessment to qualify leads)

  • Centralize deal truth (one place for status, documents, numbers, and history)

  • Support real workflows (transactions, diligence, legal, and closings all had different needs)

  • Preserve accountability (clear ownership, auditability, and change history)

This was less like designing a “tool” and more like designing the operating system behind acquisitions.

 
 
 

Key features

Lead Page

A single, comprehensive view of the lead, combining current status, history, financial context, and next actions so the team could work efficiently without hunting across tools.

 
 

Approvals

A queue-based view of in-progress offers and LOIs, designed to reduce bottlenecks and make approvals easy to manage and audit.

 
 
 

Offer tracking with version history

A full change log of deal terms over time, making negotiations trackable and reducing confusion when multiple stakeholders were involved.

 
 
 

Closings view

A focused workspace for the closings team, centered on the information and actions required to complete transactions without missing steps.

 
 
 

Dashboard

A daily driver for the offers team, showing tasks, funnel movement, and key metrics to support prioritization and pacing.

 
 

Outcome

This tool became mission-critical to the Transactions team.

  • Tens of thousands of businesses were evaluated through the platform

  • It supported 100+ acquisitions and helped close tens of millions of dollars in deals during my tenure

  • It gave Teamshares the operational infrastructure to scale acquisitions with more consistency and clarity