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Each search starts from a brief describing the mandate: a business’s revenue and EBITDA for a buyer search, a buyer’s acquisition criteria, the sector and owner profile to screen for, or the facility size and products required. From that, the candidate list is built three ways. The register is screened by industry code and by company name, so a search for owners returns every active company filed under the relevant codes. Web research runs against the brief itself, finding companies that match on what they actually do rather than on how they are filed. And the sector’s recent deals are searched for companies already acquiring, since a business that has bought a comparable company recently has shown both appetite and the ability to complete. The result is a list substantially larger than the final output requires.

The list is then reduced. Names returned by web research pass a size and location check, and those falling outside the brief are recorded as excluded, with the reason, and are not researched further. The remainder are researched in full: filed accounts, the list of directors, the ownership register, the register of charges, and the company’s own website. Turnover is not disclosed in the accounts filed by most private companies, so it is calculated two ways, from trade debtors and from headcount. Where the two calculations agree, the narrower range is recorded. Where they diverge, the wider range is recorded and marked as lower confidence.

Companies are then scored against the brief and banded high, medium or low, so the ranking reflects the mandate rather than a general measure of quality. Behind every score sits the evidence for it: each value carries its source and a rating of how far it can be relied on, from figures read straight out of filed accounts to those derived indirectly. Estimates are always ranges, and a fact checked and found absent is recorded separately from one never examined. These rules are applied as each value is saved, so an unsourced figure or a single-number estimate is rejected outright. The companies ruled out stay in the report with their reasons, past searches remain searchable, and any company marked for follow-up goes onto a watchlist that tracks the public record for changes.