Will Pacheco wants a better conversation before the deal

An acquisition begins with a peculiar social problem: one person wants to buy what another person has spent years building. The numbers can be arranged in columns. The conversation requires rather more tact. Will Pacheco has made that conversation the center of Greenfield, the buy-side advisory firm he co-founded after working in investment banking, private equity and corporate development.

His own description of the attraction is pleasantly direct: “I love matching business owners with the right private equity buyer.” It is a sentence with two parties in it. Much of his business story concerns how to give both of them a reason to stay on the line.

A buyer’s brief, an owner’s business

Pacheco has explained that one reason for starting Greenfield was his dissatisfaction with how smaller business founders could be treated in acquisition strategies. He described owners being regarded as a step in a multiple-arbitrage exercise: buy a company at one valuation multiple, combine it with others, and seek a higher multiple for the group.

The arithmetic has its attractions. It also has a remarkable ability to make the person who built the business disappear from the picture. Pacheco said he wanted lasting relationships with founders, even though those founders were not the clients paying Greenfield.

That distinction gives his work its central tension. An advisor engaged by a buyer still needs the attention and confidence of a potential seller. The owner has a business to run and a decision to make. Getting an introduction onto a calendar is only useful if the introduction deserves to be there.

“I love matching business owners with the right private equity buyer.”

Will Pacheco

Read this way, his business is an exercise in making the buyer’s search relevant to the owner’s life. A spreadsheet may establish fit. It cannot supply the owner’s answer.

Three seats around the same table

Before Greenfield, Pacheco worked in technology investment banking at RBC Capital Markets, invested in middle-market businesses at RLH Equity Partners, and became Head of Corporate Development at Mirantis, an infrastructure software company. His education includes a finance degree from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

The career sequence puts several versions of an acquisition in view. Banking involves a transaction; investing involves deciding where capital should go; corporate development places the transaction inside an operating company’s plans. Greenfield brings him to the earlier question of which businesses should be approached in the first place.

There is a revealing marker in September 2020. RLH promoted him to Senior Associate and singled out his contribution to identifying and engaging prospective portfolio companies. Years before Greenfield’s public launch, the work of finding businesses and starting relationships was already a recognized part of his career.

The continuity is more interesting than a collection of job titles. His present company concentrates on a task that repeatedly appeared in the jobs before it. The introduction, it seems, had been making introductions of its own.

Eight colleagues and a public beginning

In September 2024, Pacheco announced the launch of Greenfield Research Partners. He described a passion for business development and private equity sourcing that had grown into a company. He also thanked eight people who had joined the team over the previous six months.

That is a concrete image of an early business: several people deciding that someone else’s enthusiasm is substantial enough to become their working week. His announcement thanked customers and advisors as well. The beginning he presented was collective, with a founder’s idea gathering colleagues, support and obligations.

By December 2024, Greenfield was reported to have about ten people and was looking for someone to lead a team finding add-on acquisitions for private equity-backed companies. Pacheco described the business as growing quickly and said he wanted a more attentive approach to buy-side advisory.

The available snapshot is modest enough to be useful. It shows a firm moving from formation toward the practical demands of staffing and delivery. A growing team needs responsibilities, customers need progress, and an acquisition search needs more than its founder’s conviction to keep moving.

The software earns its keep before the call

Pacheco’s explanation of Greenfield begins with a complaint about sameness. If advisors work from similar subscription databases, they can produce similar lists. A narrow acquisition search needs information suited to its particular requirements. He described bringing in a data scientist and finding specialized databases to build more customized research.

“I just felt there was a better way to use data,” he said. The useful part of that ambition is what comes afterward. Research and email preparation consume time; automating portions of them can leave more time for speaking with founders.

He described hiring callers with ten or fifteen years of experience, people already practiced in starting business conversations. The allocation is deliberate: technology handles more preparation while experienced people handle the exchange with the owner. A machine can work through records without getting bored. The recipient of an ill-prepared call enjoys no such advantage.

Greenfield now describes its in-house Greenlight platform as connecting market mapping, qualification, founder engagement and reporting. It brings together fragmented information, structures company profiles and prioritizes candidates against a client’s acquisition thesis. The workflow gives the initial research a destination: an informed approach to a business that may actually fit.

The introduction needs an interpreter

At Greenfield, Pacheco leads client strategy, acquisition sourcing and founder engagement. His co-founder and CTO, Sean Durkin, leads the technology platform. Durkin’s background includes quantitative engineering at Bridgewater and AI work at Keystone Strategy. Their responsibilities place the commercial search and its research machinery alongside one another.

Partner Tierney Cronin, announcing her arrival after nearly eight years at Guidepoint, emphasized that combination of Pacheco’s transaction experience, in-house technology and senior outreach. She also highlighted partner oversight of engagements. It is an account of a service business whose software and people have to perform together.

Pacheco’s own hiring discussion is similarly practical. He identifies investment banking and private equity as one pool of candidates, consultative sales as another. He puts the ability to contact owners and source a meeting first, then analytical rigor, then the ability to connect the outreach specialists with acquisition clients.

The combination asks for range. A caller must be comfortable starting a conversation; an advisor must understand the company well enough to make that conversation useful. Someone then needs to translate between the owner’s business and the buyer’s requirements without losing the details that made either side interested.

Greenfield’s leadership recruitment makes the responsibility more explicit: turn investment mandates into outreach plans, manage the teams doing the work, track performance and report directly to clients. The job includes the unromantic middle of company building, where an attractive idea becomes a set of activities someone is accountable for completing.

A scorecard with a qualification

Pacheco has also described operating targets for retained searches. He wants campaigns to reach 150 approved targets, then pursue three vetting calls, two client calls and one signed nondisclosure agreement each week. He describes the numbers as a direction for the team, with an explicit acknowledgment that every campaign cannot hit them every week.

That qualification belongs beside the numbers. The scorecard sets out what he wants the business to pursue; it does not establish a history of achieving those figures. Its value as a management statement is in the sequence: identify, investigate, introduce, advance.

He also says Greenfield has become more selective about accepting retained clients where it believes those goals are achievable. That makes client selection part of execution. A firm can accept a mandate enthusiastically and still have little prospect of finding what the buyer wants.

The discipline here is easy to describe and harder to practice. A search must remain connected to the possibility of a transaction. Otherwise, a growing collection of names can become a very well-maintained substitute for progress.

The next introduction

On October 19, 2026, Stonehaven announced that Pacheco, identified as CEO of Greenfield AI, Inc, had joined its affiliate platform. His professional biography there reports more than $1.5 billion in transaction value across his career. The figure covers his work over time; it should be read in that context.

The same biography gives a few details away from acquisitions: cycling, golf and tennis. His public professional profile also lists him as a mentor and former participant with SEO, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. These are small glimpses of a person whose public account is otherwise largely concerned with the work.

The work itself keeps returning to an ordinary act. Someone researches a company. Someone decides it may belong in a buyer’s plans. Someone calls the owner. Pacheco has built Greenfield around making those steps more considered, with software improving the preparation and experienced people carrying the conversation.

For a career involving substantial transactions, it is an agreeably human point of emphasis. Before anyone can agree on the future of a business, there has to be a reason to talk about it.