Deal Origination Associate

ABOUT AVIARA

Aviara is a private equity shop focused on AI-enabled rollups in emerging markets. We buy durable, founder-led businesses where local trust already exists, then improve them with better operating cadence, sales discipline, AI automation, and sharper financial management.

Our initial focus is Argentina and Latin America. We are looking at service businesses, software-enabled services, professional services, niche B2B operators, and legacy local companies where the owner has built something real but the business still runs on manual workflows, informal sales, spreadsheets, WhatsApp, and founder memory.

We are not looking for passive analysts. We need people who can find owners, get meetings, keep a pipeline moving, and turn messy market information into actionable acquisition opportunities.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As a Deal Origination Associate, your job is to create deal flow.

You will build company lists, find owner contact information, write outreach, call founders, follow up relentlessly, qualify businesses, and keep clean notes in the pipeline. You will spend a lot of time doing direct outreach. You should be comfortable with rejection, ambiguity, and unstructured markets.

This is a tactical hunting role. A great week means you found new targets, contacted owners, got replies, booked calls, learned something useful about a market, and moved qualified opportunities forward. The role can grow into diligence or operating work, but the first job is simple: find businesses worth buying and get us in conversation with the owners.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Build target lists from scratch using Google, LinkedIn, local directories, industry associations, broker listings, WhatsApp groups, referrals, registries, and any other source that works.
• Find real owner, founder, CEO, broker, and decision-maker contact information.
• Send cold email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and phone outreach in Spanish and English.
• Make follow-up part of the job, not an afterthought. Track every touch, next step, and response.
• Book introductory calls with owners, brokers, and operators.
• Ask practical first-call questions: revenue range, customer type, owner involvement, reason for considering a sale, team size, margin profile, growth constraints, software/tools used, and what the business depends on.
• Keep the CRM clean: company profile, owner contact, source, status, next action, notes, financial snippets, strategic fit, and risks.
• Build weekly market maps for specific acquisition themes, such as legal services, accounting firms, field services, specialty B2B services, software-enabled agencies, local vertical SaaS, logistics, compliance, healthcare admin, education services, or other fragmented categories.
• Write short target memos that explain what the company does, why the owner might sell, how the business makes money, what could break, and where AI or operating improvements could matter.
• Support early diligence by collecting financials, customer information, org charts, product/service details, and operating workflows.
• Help us identify repeatable acquisition theses, not just random one-off companies.

WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE

• You are adding new qualified companies to the pipeline every week.
• You are personally creating conversations with owners, not waiting for inbound leads.
• Your notes are crisp enough that someone else can pick up a conversation without asking you what happened.
• You know which verticals are producing responses and which are wasting time.
• You can explain why a business is interesting in plain language, without hiding behind generic finance words.
• You are persistent, direct, and professional with owners.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 1-3 years of experience in sales, business development, search funds, private equity, investment banking, consulting, corporate development, startups, recruiting, or any role where you had to source opportunities and get people to respond.
• Strong Spanish and English communication.
• Comfortable cold contacting business owners by email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and phone.
• High output. You can manage a large target list, many follow-ups, and multiple active conversations without losing the thread.
• Basic finance fluency: you understand revenue, gross margin, EBITDA, working capital, customer concentration, recurring vs. project revenue, and why those things matter.
• Good writing. You can summarize a call, a company, or a market in a way that is useful for an investment decision.
• Commercial judgment. You can tell the difference between a real business, a tiny freelance operation, a bad fit, and a company worth pursuing.
• Low ego and high persistence. This is a lot of unglamorous work.

HELPFUL BUT NOT REQUIRED

• Experience sourcing SMB acquisitions, founder-led businesses, brokers, or search-fund targets.
• Familiarity with Argentina or Latin American business culture.
• Experience selling to owners, CEOs, doctors, lawyers, accountants, contractors, local operators, or other hard-to-reach decision makers.
• Experience using AI tools for list building, enrichment, outreach personalization, call summaries, translation, or diligence.

APPLICATION QUESTIONS

• Tell us about a time you had to cold source opportunities, customers, candidates, leads, or deals. What did you actually do each day?
• Pick one fragmented service category in Argentina or Latin America that Aviara should study. How would you build the first 100-company target list?
• Write a short cold outreach note to the owner of a founder-led accounting firm or niche B2B services company.
• Describe your experience with founder/owner outreach, sales, recruiting, sourcing, financial analysis, or investment memos.
• Are you comfortable calling and messaging owners directly in Spanish?