Owner response rates by sector: who will talk about selling.

Every buy-and-build thesis rests on an assumption nobody checks: that the owners in the sector will pick up the conversation. These owner response rates by sector come from 288,294 acquisition and exit emails we sent to business owners on behalf of buyers and M&A advisors between 19 June and 11 October 2026, and they show that the assumption holds in some sectors and falls apart in others. In health tech, 4.9 owners per 1,000 emails said yes to a conversation. In home services, it was 0.1, and more of the owners who replied asked never to be contacted again than in any other sector we measured.

What did we measure?

We measured how business owners answered real acquisition and exit outreach, by sector. The data covers 35 campaigns across 7 origination mandates run by DealSource Systems, the deal origination arm of Danish Lead Co, for private equity buyers, acquirers and M&A advisors. Every campaign wrote to the owner, founder or CEO of an owner-led business, almost all of them in the US, and asked, in one form or another, whether they would talk about an acquisition, a partnership or an exit.

• Window. 19 June to 11 October 2026, sixteen weeks. That is the period in which every reply on these campaigns was classified, so the reply counts and the email counts cover the same days.
• Emails. 288,294 emails sent, follow-ups included, counted the same way as our deal origination benchmarks.
• Open to a conversation. A reply that said the owner was interested or asked for a call or meeting. Requests for more information are counted separately and not included, so the headline figure is deliberately strict.
• Human replies. Every reply except out-of-office notices and messages that could not be classified.
• Sectors. Twelve, assigned by the target list each campaign was built on, then checked against the industries of the owners who actually replied. One campaign that had been labelled home services was dropped because its list turned out to be mixed across a dozen sectors, and healthcare staffing was dropped because it sent only 430 emails in the window.

No buyer, advisor or client is named here, and no figure can be traced to one.

Which business owners are most open to an acquisition conversation?

Health tech, facility services and industrial manufacturing and distribution owners were the most open, and home services, medical practices and diagnostic imaging owners the least. Across all twelve sectors, 1.2 owners per 1,000 emails said yes to a conversation, and 19% of the owners who replied at all were open to one.

Two columns matter here, and they answer different questions. "Open per 1,000 emails" is what a buyer actually gets for the volume they send, so it is the number to plan a programme around. "Share of human replies that were open" removes the effect of how many emails reached a person in the first place, so it is the closer read on how owners in the sector feel about being approached. Both put health tech first and home services last.

Why are home services owners so hard to reach?

Home services owners were the least responsive sector on every measure we have. Across 15,939 emails to HVAC, plumbing, roofing and other home and building services owners, 52 owners replied, 2 were open to a conversation, and 20 asked not to be contacted again. That is 38% of every human reply, the highest "do not contact" share of the twelve sectors. Med spa owners were close behind at 35%; across all sectors the figure was 19%. It is also one of the smallest samples in the table: two open owners is enough to say the rate is low, not exactly how low.

The most likely reason is saturation. HVAC, plumbing, electrical and pest control have been among the most active roll-up categories in private equity for several years, which means the owner of a good home services business has probably heard from a buyer this month already. Our data cannot prove that, since we do not see the other emails in their inbox, but the pattern fits: the sectors at the bottom of the table, home services, medical practices, imaging, med spas and behavioural health, are the ones buyers have been consolidating hardest.

The lower reach also plays a part. Home services and medical practices produced about 3 human replies per 1,000 emails, half the dataset's 6.2, so fewer messages were being read or answered at all. Medical practices rest on only 31 human replies and home services on 52, which is too few to rank them precisely; treat those rows as "low" rather than as exact figures.

If your thesis sits in one of these sectors, none of this says do not pursue it. It says the owner who will talk is scarcer and more tired of being asked, so the list, the angle and the patience have to be better than the next buyer's. Our notes on sourcing home services acquisitions cover what tends to work there.

Which sectors have the most open owners once they reply?

Health tech and marketing agencies had the highest share of open owners among those who replied: 42% and 28%. In health tech, owners who were open (50) slightly outnumbered those who declined or asked not to be contacted (49). Facility services and industrial owners were next at 23% and 22%, though both lists also carried a high share of wrong-person replies (30% and 19%), which says more about the target data than about the owners.

Marketing agencies are worth a second look because they combine scale with openness. They were the second-largest sector in the dataset at 54,454 emails, and still returned 1.7 open owners per 1,000. Founder-led service businesses where the founder is the asset tend to be curious about what an exit would look like, even when they are not ready for one. For how buyers approach that sector, see our digital marketing agency acquisitions guide.

How should a buyer use owner response rates by sector?

Use them to set expectations before a programme starts, not to pick a thesis. A buyer's thesis should come from where they can create value; owner response rates by sector tell them how much outreach that thesis will take and how early to judge it. We use a four-step read:

1. 1. Price the volume. Divide the conversations you need by the sector's open rate. Twenty owner conversations in a sector running 1.7 per 1,000 is roughly 12,000 emails; in a sector running 0.5, it is 40,000. That gap is the difference between a list you have and a list you need to build.
2. 2. Check the "do not contact" share. Above 30%, owners are hearing from buyers too often. Lead with something specific to the business rather than a generic approach, and slow the cadence.
3. 3. Separate reach from appetite. If human replies per 1,000 emails are low, the problem is the list or the inbox, not the owners. Our acquisition outreach reachability data shows how much of that is decided by the email system behind each target.
4. 4. Judge at day 14, not day 90. In our first 90 days of deal origination we set out why a segment with nothing by day 14 rarely recovers. The sector rate tells you what "nothing" should look like.

Sector choice still sits with the investment case. Our view of the best industries for proprietary deal flow weighs fragmentation and competition; this data adds the owner's side of the same question.

What can this data not tell you?

It cannot tell you that a sector's owners are more or less likely to sell. A reply in the first week of an outreach programme measures willingness to talk, and plenty of owners who decline today sell within two years, while some who take the call never sell at all.

• It is not a controlled test. Each sector's figure comes from one or two mandates, with their own buyer, message, list source and timing. A sector near the top may partly reflect a strong message, and one near the bottom a weak list. The direction is consistent across both measures, but the exact gaps should be read loosely.
• It is almost entirely US owners. About 1% of the emails went to businesses in Canada; everything else targeted US businesses.
• Small sectors are noisy. Industrial manufacturing and distribution, home services and medical practices all rest on fewer than 60 human replies, and health tech and physical therapy on a single campaign each.
• It says nothing about deal size or price. We do not record enterprise value or revenue on enough targets to band them, so we have not tried.

We would rather publish those limits than a cleaner-looking table. For how a DealSource Systems engagement is built around numbers like these, see how it works and our published pricing.

How to cite this data

You are welcome to use any figure or the table on this page, in an article, a report, a deck or a course, with a credit and a link. Suggested citation: DealSource Systems, "Owner response rates by sector", October 2026, https://dealsourcesystems.com/blog/owner-response-rates-by-sector/. For a sector cut that is not shown here, or a comment from Frederik Jakobsen, email frederik@danishleadco.io. Bios, boilerplate and the logo are on our press page.

Conclusion

Owners in different sectors do not respond to buyers the same way, and the spread is wide: from 4.9 owners open to a conversation per 1,000 emails in health tech to 0.1 in home services, in the same sixteen weeks, from the same origination team. The sectors buyers have consolidated hardest sit at the bottom, and their owners are the most likely to ask not to be contacted again. A thesis in one of those sectors needs more volume, a sharper reason to talk, and an earlier decision on whether a list is working. A thesis in one of the open sectors can expect owners to say yes, and quickly. Either way, it is better to know the number before the first email than to learn it at month three. If you want to know what yours looks like, book a call.

If you would rather have this run for you, DealSource Systems does off-market deal sourcing for lower middle market private equity: owners reached directly before they run a process, for a flat $4,000 a month.

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