They are on the register. A founder in their late sixties, thirty years in the same company, no successor named, no institutional owner above them. That business will change hands. Nobody has called them about it.
We screen the UK register against your acquisition thesis and hand you the ones worth approaching, with the reason each one qualifies.
If you are running a search or a sponsor mandate, the hard part is rarely diligence and it is rarely funding. It is filling the top of the funnel with owners who are genuinely reachable and genuinely near a decision, without paying a premium for a process everyone else is already in.
By the time a business is listed, the owner has an adviser, a set of expectations, and several buyers in the room. You are bidding, not originating. The information advantage is gone before you arrive.
No adviser, no process, no competing bid. The conversation starts on your terms and moves at the pace the owner is comfortable with. The difficulty was always finding them.
Every UK company files who owns it and roughly when those owners were born. Read across the whole register and a pattern falls out that no purchased list contains: which businesses are run by someone approaching the end of their working life, with nobody behind them.
Sector, geography, size band, minimum trading history. We take the mandate off your own site and turn it into something a screen can actually run, then confirm it with you before anything is pulled.
The Companies House company file joined to the daily persons with significant control snapshot, on company number. That pairing gives sector, incorporation date, accounts category and, critically, the individuals who actually control the business along with their approximate ages.
Fit measures how closely the company matches your mandate. Propensity estimates whether the owner would engage now. They are reported separately because a perfect fit that will never sell costs you exactly the same outreach slot as one that will.
Every point awarded carries a written justification traceable to a public filing. The reasons are the deliverable. A ranked list without them is a filter output, and a filter output is a list of companies you still have to research one at a time before you can write to any of them. The reasons are what turn three hundred rows into eleven calls.
| Signal | Why it predicts availability |
|---|---|
| Controlling owner's approximate age | Life stage predicts a sale far better than distress does. Most private companies come to market because someone got older, not because something went wrong. |
| Years in the seat | Two or three decades in one business means a life's work that has to be realised somehow, and usually only once. |
| Individual versus corporate control | A corporate controlling owner normally means an institution is already involved, so the situation is not proprietary to you. |
| Ownership concentration | One or two controlling individuals is a short path to a decision. Five is a negotiation before the negotiation. |
| Absence of a successor | A sole director past sixty with nobody else on the board has an unresolved problem whether or not they have named it yet. |
| Digital under-investment | Optional. A sound business with a neglected online presence is a value creation thesis for you, and a natural, non-threatening opening subject with the owner. |
One document per screen, written so it can be forwarded to an investment committee without translation.
The exact thesis the screen ran against, in your own words, so there is no ambiguity about what was and was not looked for.
Universe screened, profiled, qualified, and the count that reached each band. You see what was excluded, not just what survived.
Every candidate with its fit score, propensity score, company age, owner age and band.
The principal, their approximate age and tenure, ownership structure, why this one and why now, and the watch-outs.
How this specific owner is best approached, given how long they have run it. Not a template.
Every figure traceable to a company number you can check yourself in under a minute.
Before any money changes hands we run a real screen against your real thesis and send you the result. It is deliberately structured in two halves, and it is worth being upfront about why.
Company name and number, so you can pull the filings yourself and confirm every claim inside a minute. This is the part that proves the method is real rather than described.
Full succession profile on each, identity withheld. You see the volume and the quality of what the screen surfaces. Engagement releases the names.
No owner is contacted at the sample stage, or at any stage, without your instruction.
You will test these in the first call, so they may as well be in writing. None of them are unusual, and anyone claiming otherwise is overselling.
VEKTOR acquires ecommerce businesses. The sourcing engine was built to find our own targets, because the same problem applies at our end of the market: the good ones are not listed. It works, so we run it for other acquirers.
That is the honest origin, and it raises the obvious question, so here is the answer. We acquire in consumer ecommerce only. If your mandate is software, industrials, healthcare, business services, aerospace, distribution or anything outside consumer ecommerce, there is no overlap and no scenario where we are competing for the same company.
Where a mandate genuinely does overlap with ours, we say so before any work begins and you decide whether to proceed. A sourcing relationship where the source might want the asset is not worth having, for either side.
Deliberately small and deliberately cancellable. A sourcing relationship should be judged on what arrives each month, not on what was promised at the start.
A real screen on your real thesis, partly redacted. No commitment either way.
Continuous screening as new filings land, plus owner approaches run in your name or ours.
No minimum term, no notice period. Stop whenever it stops being useful.
A reduced retainer against a small fee on completion, if you prefer the risk shared.
No, and it is worth being clear about that. The underlying filings are public and free. What is not free is the work: joining the datasets, scoring succession exposure across the whole register, and turning that into a ranked shortlist against one specific mandate. The advantage is in the analysis and the fact that almost nobody does it, not in owning a database nobody else can reach.
None as a sourcing partner, and be suspicious of anyone in this seat who claims otherwise, because the person who found a deal is not the person who negotiated it. What is being bought is qualified owner conversations. Here is the number to hold us to: month one is the screen and the shortlist, and from month two the measure is how many owners with a live succession situation are on a call with you. If that is not moving by month three, cancel. There is no notice period for exactly that reason.
Yes, and some do. The datasets are free and the logic is not secret. What it costs is the engineering to join and score them, and then the hours every month to keep re-screening as new filings land. The build is a weekend. The maintenance is the job: re-screening as new filings land, keeping the propensity model honest as it meets real owners, and writing the reason lines. That recurring cost does not shrink, and it is what the retainer is. Month to month, precisely so you can stop when it stops earning.
Your choice. Some buyers want the list and nothing else and prefer to approach in their own name. Others want the approaches run and only the interested owners passed through. Both work, and it can change once you have seen how the first month goes.
The screen is built per mandate, so two different theses produce genuinely different shortlists. Where mandates genuinely collide, we say so rather than quietly running both. That is a smaller business and a considerably longer one.
The first screen is quick, since the data is already indexed. Owner conversations take longer, because approaching someone about the sale of their life's work badly is worse than not approaching them at all. Expect the first month to be about calibration: which profiles are right, which approach lands, what you want more of.
Point us at your mandate page or describe it in two lines. You get a real screen against it, with a few named so you can check the work yourself. No call required to receive it.
Reply within 48 hours. No owner is contacted without your instruction.