You Just Chip Away Everything That Doesn't Look Like David

Buckle up. I am about to contrast Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo with expert networking and market research.

We are knee-deep in expert research right now for some genuinely industrial markets - heavy manufacturing, infrastructure, materials, the kind of projects that do not make headlines the way data centers do. But there is far more re-industrialization happening in this country than the news cycle suggests, and I would argue these projects are just as important because they are mobilizing the US workforce to build things that last and can endure - monuments workers can look at and be proud of.

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There is no clean SaaS org chart. No heavily PE-backed universe where everyone already understands why an expert network is calling. The value chains are tangled - general contractor (GC) versus subcontractor dynamics shift state to state, sometimes county to county. And the workforce we are sourcing is largely blue-collar. They are not posting "thought leadership" on LinkedIn - although you may find them on Facebook. Half of them barely have a profile.

Increasingly, that also means clients do not hand us a clean target list - they hand us a handful of known names and lean on us to fill in the rest. So we have started doing something that has not traditionally sat inside an expert network: building the sector map ourselves. Figuring out who the real players are - the subcontractors, the regional shops, the private companies that never show up in a screener - before we ever get to sourcing an individual expert.

It is a muscle I picked up years ago doing deal origination work in investment banking, building target lists for bolt-on and tuck-in acquisitions across healthcare and industrials. I used CapIQ and Pitchbook - but searching in an AI era takes a different form by being able to parse through large publicly available data sets. Turns out this skillset transfers directly: when nobody has a definitive map of a market, somebody has to build one before anyone can source into it. More and more, that somebody is us - not because clients are unprepared, but because these markets genuinely do not have the visibility that PE-backed or venture-backed spaces do.

So what do I tell my team when a market like this gets hard - whether it is mapping the sector or sourcing inside it? I summon the indomitable Michelangelo.

Asked how he carved David out of a single block of marble, he supposedly said something that has stuck with me ever since.

That is this work. Especially in the messy markets. You are not going to find the perfect profile - or the perfect target list - by staring harder at the haystack. You find it by removing everything that clearly is not the needle.

I call this "looking for the negative," and it is one of the most useful habits I have built into how I search data aggregation tools inside large organizations. This practice started in Sales Navigator, but we use a litany of databases now and the same theory applies.

Here is the logic: it is almost always easier to identify what does not belong than to spot the perfect fit. Same instinct as job-hunting - most people can rattle off everything wrong with their current employer far faster than they can articulate what they actually want next. The negative sticks. That is just how we are evolutionarily wired, optimist or not.

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So when we are staring down 1,000-plus search results at a large company, we do not try to filter our way to perfection on the first pass. We flip through page by page and start collecting titles and keywords that obviously do not belong. Then we search those terms directly, confirm they are noise, and start excluding them.

Repeat that a few times and your dataset starts shrinking fast - 1,500 down to 1,000 is a real win, not just numerically but mentally. The alternative is manually wading through 500 extra profiles that will leave you questioning whether you are a researcher or a professional LinkedIn gopher.

Say the target industry is regulatory-adjacent - a client wants to understand how upcoming regulatory changes might affect companies they have invested in. The target profile is lawyers who have written regulatory framework, issued licenses, maybe built tariff-based fee models.

Here is what clearly does not belong, and gets excluded: Trial lawyers - exclude "trial." Mediation lawyers - exclude "mediation." Administrative law generalists - exclude "administrative."

Three exclusions in, and the dataset is already telling a cleaner story.

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Send a connection request to someone in Talent Acquisition or HR at the target company. TA people get networking - they will read your request as no-strings-attached, because they know it might help them too someday. There is a psychological edge when a cold outreach lands next to a mutual connection... or so I tell myself as I am closing in on 15,000 connections on LinkedIn.

The other benefit is compounding: once you have a couple of connections inside a company, their networks become visible to you as 2nd-degree connections. Often the expertise you are looking for is not missing - it is just outside your "seeable" network. Every connection you add expands what you can actually see.

Whether it is a $50B industrial buildout that never makes the front page, a sector map with no client-provided starting point, or a 1,500-name Sales Navigator search that needs to be 200, the job is the same: you are not manufacturing the answer, you are removing what is not it.

You just chip away everything that does not look like David.