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The Boutique Outreach Playbook

How to pick your 30 firms, find the right person to write to, and structure a short email that actually gets replies — for boutique M&A shops, wealth managers, PE/VC, and prop firms that don't run a graduate scheme.

1. Why boutiques

Every graduate/placement portal at a bulge-bracket bank or Big Four firm gets thousands of applications for a handful of roles — some grad schemes report 3,000+ applicants per place. You are, statistically, mostly wasting your time there. Not because you're not good enough — because the odds are built to reject almost everyone regardless of quality.

A boutique M&A shop, a 15-person wealth manager, a 6-person prop desk — these firms don't run graduate schemes. They don't have a careers portal. When they need someone, they hire when they notice they need someone, and they hire whoever is in front of them at that moment with a sensible, specific email. Most of them get zero to five unsolicited applications a year, not three thousand.

The trade-off: boutique roles are less structured, sometimes unpaid or low-paid for the first placement, and you won't get a slick induction programme. What you get instead: real deal exposure from week one, direct access to the people making decisions, and a CV line that shows initiative rather than “I filled in a form like everyone else.”

This playbook is about the mechanics of finding these firms and getting a reply — not about whether boutique experience is “worth it.” If you're reading this, you've already decided it is.

2. How to read a database row

Every firm in Placement Scout carries the same columns:

• Sector — M&A / advisory, asset & wealth management, PE/VC, or quant & trading. Match to what you actually want to do — don't spray identical emails across sectors.
• City — registered office location. Boutiques cluster in London, but regional ones (Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh) have far less competition for the same reply.
• Website / careers page — direct links, no job board in between. If a “careers page” is just a contact form or doesn't exist, that's a signal: this firm hires informally, which is exactly the kind of firm that responds well to a direct email.
• FCA authorised — whether the firm is regulated, plus a link to verify on the public register. Authorisation signals an active, real business — but plenty of legitimate advisory/PE firms are unregulated, so don't filter these out.
• Incorporated — year the company was founded. See “picking your 30” below — recency is a strong reply-rate signal.
• Contact — a verified role inbox (info@, careers@, etc.) where we found one. A fallback, never your first choice — see section 4.

The database is a starting point, not a finished target list. The next section is about cutting a long list of firms down to a shortlist you can actually work.

3. Picking your 30

Don't email every firm in the database. Don't even email 100. Response quality collapses the moment your emails stop being specific to each firm, and generic mail-merged outreach is easy for anyone reading it to spot and bin.

The 10/10/10 rule:

• 10 reach firms — well-known-in-their-niche, established boutiques you'd be thrilled to hear back from. Low reply odds, high upside.
• 10 realistic firms — small, active, sector-matched, no obvious red flags. This is where most of your replies will come from.
• 10 recently-authorised or recently-incorporated firms — the highest-odds segment, don't skip it in favour of only chasing recognisable names.

Filter first by:

1. City + sector fit. If you can't credibly explain why this firm in this city, don't email it yet.
2. Recency. A firm authorised or incorporated in the last 12–18 months has no graduate-scheme machinery, no backlog of applications, and is actively growing headcount by definition — the highest-reply-rate segment in the whole database. The weekly “new firms” digest exists specifically to surface these before anyone else finds them.
3. Signs of an actual careers page. Counterintuitively, a firm with no careers page is often a better target than one with a generic one — it usually means “we hire when we need to, informally,” which is precisely the situation your email should walk into.

Thirty well-chosen firms, researched properly, beats a thousand generic ones. This isn't a numbers game — it's a research game.

4. Finding the right person

Never lead with a generic inbox. info@ and careers@ addresses are triaged by whoever's free, if they're read at all. At a firm with 5–20 people, there is almost always a named partner, director, or founder you can find and email directly — and a direct, personal email from a student who clearly did their homework gets read completely differently to one landing in a shared inbox.

Where to find the name:

1. The firm's own website — “Team” or “About” pages at boutiques are usually a full list of partners/directors with bios, sometimes even direct emails.
2. The FCA register's individuals search — for FCA-authorised firms, the register lists approved persons attached to the firm. This tells you who's formally responsible — often the person worth writing to.
3. LinkedIn triangulation — search the firm name, filter to people, look for Founder/Partner/Director/MD titles. Cross-check against the website team page to confirm you've got the right person.

If, after all that, you genuinely can't find a named person — that's when the role inbox in the database becomes your fallback, not your default.

5. The email

The four-line structure:

1. A specific hook about their firm. Not “I'm interested in finance” — something that proves you actually looked at this firm specifically. A recent deal, a sector niche, something from their website or a news mention.
2. Why them, in one line. Connect your hook to why you, specifically, want to work at a firm like this rather than a bulge-bracket bank — smaller teams, more responsibility, the specific sector.
3. What you bring, in one line. Not a CV dump — one credible, relevant thing (a course, a project, a prior internship, a specific skill) that's actually applicable to what they do.
4. A small, easy ask. Not “do you have any openings?” — ask for 15 minutes on a call, or to send your CV for whenever something comes up. Low-commitment asks get said yes to far more often than “give me a job.”

Keep the whole thing under 150 words. Boutique partners read email on their phone between meetings — length is a filter against you, not a sign of effort.

6. The follow-up cadence

Most replies come from the follow-up, not the first email — people are busy, not uninterested.

• Day 4: a short, one-line bump. Don't re-explain yourself — just resurface the email (“following up in case this got buried — happy to send more info or jump on a quick call”).
• Day 10: one new angle. A relevant news item, a slightly different ask, or a small piece of extra context that wasn't in the first email — it needs to give them a new reason to reply.
• After day 10: stop. Move on. A third follow-up reads as pressure, not persistence, and burns the relationship for future attempts (e.g. next year).

Tracking: use a simple sheet as you go — Sent → Replied → Call booked → outcome, with the contact name and date in notes. With 30 firms in motion at once, a spreadsheet is the only way to remember who you followed up with and when.

7. Converting a call into a placement

If you get a call or a meeting, the goal isn't to “interview well” in the traditional sense — most boutiques aren't running a formal process, so the call itself often decides the outcome.

Questions worth asking:

• What does someone in this role actually spend their time on day to day? (Shows you're thinking about the substance of the job, not just getting a title.)
• What's a recent piece of work the team's been proud of? (Gives them a chance to talk about something they're genuinely engaged in.)
• Is there a specific gap in the team right now you're trying to fill?

If there's no formal internship advertised: don't wait to be offered one — propose it. Once it's clear there's mutual interest, a direct, low-pressure suggestion (“would a short unpaid trial period over [dates] be useful for you, so we can both see if this is a good fit?”) often converts genuine interest into an actual placement, because you're removing the friction of them having to invent a formal process from scratch. Small firms often don't say no to free, capable help — they just never got around to setting up a scheme for it.