Field note · August 2026

The Buying Signals Are Public. Nobody Reads Them.

Every week, government agencies publish lists of companies that just acquired an urgent, expensive problem. FDA warning letters. OSHA citations. Layoff notices. Plant filings. They are free, searchable, and dated — and almost nobody treats them as what they are.

Compliance teams read them as risk. Journalists read them as news. Sales teams, overwhelmingly, don’t read them at all — they buy stale contact lists instead and guess at who might have a problem their client solves.

A warning letter is a purchase order the buyer hasn’t written yet.

Read those same lists as demand and the picture inverts. Each entry names a company, a problem, and an implicit deadline. The counterpart — the operator or specialist who solves exactly that problem — is usually easy to name too. What’s missing is anyone whose actual job is putting the two in a room.

That’s the gap I work. No proprietary data, no inside track — public record, read on purpose, matched against people who fix things for a living.

Outsiders assume the edge in B2B is secret information. The actual edge is that public information goes unread.

— Jarad Hayes routes introductions between companies under public pressure and the operators who relieve it.