The Meeting I Almost Did Not Take
There is a version of professionalism that keeps you very safe and permanently limited.
It is the version that says: stick to what you know, refer out what you do not, and never promise something you cannot already deliver. It is sensible advice. It is also, taken too literally, a ceiling.
Knowing when to say no is important in sourcing. But so is knowing when to sit down, ask questions, and find a way to make something work that you have never done before.
This is the story of how a single meeting over coffee changed the direction of our business, and how a small adaptation to our fee structure turned out to be one of the most valuable investments we ever made.
A Different Kind of Referral
For several years, our focus had been on building buy-to-let portfolios for our investors. We had done the work, learned the craft, and built a reputation in the residential space. It was solid, reliable, and familiar.
Then a referral came in that did not fit the mould at all.
We were recommended to a small group of commercial investors. Experienced people who knew exactly what they were looking for but were struggling to find enough suitable opportunities to meet their needs. They were looking for support on the sourcing side.
The properties they were interested in were not like anything we had worked on before. Large development sites. Former mill buildings with conversion potential. The kind of opportunities that required a completely different lens, a different network, and a different understanding of how value was created and assessed.
The easy response would have been to thank them for the referral and explain that commercial sourcing was outside our current offering. Clean, honest, and entirely safe.
Instead, I picked up the phone and arranged a coffee.
What the Meeting Revealed
I went into that meeting with one objective. To understand exactly what they were looking for and to work out whether there was a way we could genuinely help each other.
What became clear very quickly was that the knowledge gap ran in both directions.
They understood commercial property deeply. They knew how to assess a development site, how to structure a deal, and how to evaluate whether a former industrial building had genuine conversion potential. That expertise had taken years to build.
What they did not have was the time or resource to find enough opportunities. Their deal flow was the problem, and finding deals was exactly what we did.
The question was whether we could bridge the knowledge gap on our side quickly enough to be genuinely useful.
The Arrangement We Proposed
Rather than walking away or pretending we had expertise we did not yet have, I put a different proposition on the table.
At the time, our standard sourcing fee was two percent of the purchase price, with a minimum of £8,000 per deal. It was a fair fee for the work involved and one we had no particular reason to reduce.
But I was not just looking at what the deal was worth today. I was looking at what access to their knowledge and experience could be worth over the following years.
I asked whether they would be willing to work with us on a different basis for an initial period. In exchange for a reduction on our standard fee, they would teach us how they operated. How they filtered potential sites at the outset. How they assessed a site before committing further time to it. What they looked for on a viewing. How they secured a site they wanted. What due diligence they carried out once a deal was agreed. And crucially, the formula they used to decide whether to say yes or no to an opportunity.
In short, I was asking them to let us learn the business from the inside, alongside people who already knew it at the highest level.
They agreed.
What We Gained
The fee reduction was real. We earned less per deal during that initial period than we would have under our standard structure.
What we gained in return was something no course or coaching programme could have replicated in the same way.
We learned how experienced commercial investors actually think. Not in a classroom or a webinar, but on sites, in conversations, working through real deals with real stakes. We understood how they filtered opportunities before spending significant time on them. We saw how they walked a site and what they were looking for. We learned what made them say yes and, just as importantly, what made them walk away.
That knowledge became part of how we operated. It shaped the questions we asked, the opportunities we pursued, and the clients we were able to serve from that point forward.
A Different Way to Think About Sourcing Education
The sourcing industry has no shortage of training options. Courses, coaching programmes, masterminds - with some of them having a genuine place in building a professional practice.
But there is another form of education that is often overlooked, and in some ways it is the most effective of all. Learning alongside experienced practitioners on live deals, with real accountability on both sides.
The fee reduction we offered was not a discount. It was an investment in a form of knowledge that we could not have acquired any other way.
If you are looking to move into a strategy that sits outside your current experience, it is worth asking whether there is a version of this arrangement available to you. Are there investors already operating in that space who are struggling to find enough quality deals? Is there something you can offer them, even at a reduced rate, that creates the conditions for you to learn alongside them?
The meeting I almost did not take turned out to be one of the most important decisions we made as a business.
Sometimes the opportunity to grow is sitting right there in the referral you were about to decline.
