Inception Equity Partners

Inception knew exactly who they were after: privately owned technical and compliance services firms, £1.5m to £30m turnover, with recurring revenue and strong engineering teams. The problem was reaching them. These are owner-run businesses in smaller towns and the countryside, the kind that barely show up online and are missing from most standard sources. The specialist M&A databases that do cover them are expensive and still incomplete.

To find opportunities at the pace Inception wanted, we had to do three hard things at once: identify every business in the market that fit the mandate, pull the financial and filing detail needed to qualify each one, and then get in front of the owner directly, at scale.

We combined multiple databases with our own research to build a full picture of every company matching Inception’s criteria, well beyond what any single subscription covers. On top of that map we pulled filing data straight from Companies House for each business, so Inception could filter on turnover, margins and recurring revenue and look only at genuine fits.

We then ran the approach at the scale the mandate required, reaching 2,000 to 3,000 new owners a day, with a call following every response. Every conversation fed market intelligence back into the research, which we used to keep sharpening both who we approached and what we said to them.

The work produced direct seller conversations almost immediately, four to five qualified discussions a week inside the first two weeks. Just as importantly, what came off those calls gave Inception a clearer read on which owners were genuinely open to a deal and what landed with them, letting us continuously tighten both the targeting and the pitch.