For searchers acquiring one UK company
Skip the sourcing.
Talk to founders.
DealSmart replaces two subscriptions at once. A proprietary dataset of 5.7 million UK companies, enriched, scored and filtered to your mandate. And the CRM that works it — outreach written, sent, chased and triaged until an owner writes back wanting to talk.
Two moments need you. Everything between them does not.
5.7 million UK companies. Enriched, scored, ready to act on.
Not a directory and not an export. Every company carries a finished record: ownership decoded, board resolved, financial history parsed, and our own succession and transaction signals computed across the entire market rather than looked up one company at a time.
Multiple datasets joined into a single record per company, then enriched with AI and our own analysis. Which is why “a sole director over sixty who owns three quarters of the business and has started nothing else” is a filter here, and a research project everywhere else.
Proprietary succession signals
A sole director past sixty. A board unchanged since incorporation. Two directors sharing a surname. An owner thirty years in who has started nothing since. Scored across the whole market, so the question is which of these companies, not whether this one qualifies.
Transaction signals
Secured debt taken or satisfied. Capital events and share allotments. Board changes, group restructuring, dormancy, overdue filings. The things that tend to move in the year before a business changes hands.
Ownership, decoded
Who controls what, and how much of it — read as the bands they genuinely are rather than flattened into percentages that are not true.
Filters that match how you think
Sector, size, company age, geography, owner age, director age, sole director, ownership concentration, secured debt, overdue accounts. Your mandate bounds every search; filters narrow inside it and cannot widen past it.
And the platform that works it, from first email to call-ready.
A dataset is half a product. Promote a company and it becomes a deal with a stage, an owner and a full activity history — outreach drafted from that company’s own record, sent under your name, from your domain.
You approve the first message to each owner: the one that cannot be taken back. Everything after runs without you — the follow-ups, the spacing, the out-of-office that is not a reply, the “not right now, try me in the spring” that needs a diary entry eighteen weeks out. Nobody sustains that by hand alongside a full-time search, and it is the part that quietly decides the outcome.
A pipeline, not a list
Stages from Qualified through to Offer, an owner on every deal, and an activity log that records who moved what and when. The board is the product, not a view bolted onto a spreadsheet.
Outreach written from the record
Not a mail merge. Each draft is built from that company’s own history — how long it has traded, who sits on the board, what changed last year — and held for your approval before it sends.
Follow-up that stops the moment they answer
Sequenced and spaced the way a person would, and cut off instantly on a genuine reply. An owner never receives a chaser after writing back.
Nurture, because a no in March is not a no in November
Owners who said not now come back round on their own schedule. The ones who sell are frequently the ones who said no the first time.
Every reply read and sorted
Interested, not now, or no. Out-of-office and bounces are recognised as what they are and never counted as interest.
What this replaces
Two subscriptions and a spreadsheet.
Most searches run on a data subscription, a general-purpose CRM, and a spreadsheet where the two get reconciled by hand every Friday. DealSmart is one thing instead of three, and the reconciliation stops existing.
The data subscription
If you are buying one UK company under £10m, a PitchBook seat is the wrong instrument. That category is built around funded companies and institutional deal flow — and the businesses worth buying on a succession trade have never raised a penny in their lives. You end up paying for coverage that is thickest exactly where your mandate is not.
ReplacedThe general-purpose CRM
A pipeline tool does not know what a company is. You configure it, you paste into it, and it still cannot tell you the owner is sixty-eight with nobody behind him. Ours starts from the record and is already populated the moment you promote a company.
ReplacedThe spreadsheet
Which exists only because the first two have never spoken to each other. It is where the real pipeline actually lives, it is always slightly out of date, and it is the single biggest reason good targets get dropped.
ReplacedThe handoff
Call-ready means a person wrote back, in their own words, wanting to keep talking.
It is not a booked call. You book that. The first conversation with an owner is yours to shape, and handing it to software would be the one automation that costs you the deal.
It is not a lead score. No number stands in for a human being deciding they are curious enough to reply.
It is not a list of opens and clicks. An owner who opened your email four times and said nothing has told you nothing.
What lands in your inbox
- Their reply, in full, in their words.
- The company record — everything we hold on the business, each value marked filed, derived, not filed or unreadable.
- The thread so far, so you open the call knowing exactly what they have already read.
- The pipeline row, already on your board, so nothing is retyped.
What comes next
Once a conversation becomes a process, the numbers need the same discipline.
Financial due diligence and the work around it is where this goes next: the same insistence on knowing where every figure came from, applied to a set of accounts you are about to pay for. It is not built yet, and we would rather say so here than let you find out later. Today DealSmart takes you from a mandate to a founder who wants to talk.
Suitability
We are not the right partner for everyone.
A strong fit
- Funded or self-funded searchers acquiring one UK company
- Enterprise values roughly £1m to £10m
- Off-market by preference, not as a last resort
- A mandate you can state, even loosely
- Willing to take calls that go nowhere to find the one that does
Not a fit
- £25m+ processes, where brokers run the room
- Anyone wanting a list to export and email themselves
- Buyers outside the UK
- A mandate that changes every fortnight
- Anyone expecting signed deals rather than conversations
Questions we get asked
Is the data yours?
Yes. Five point seven million UK company records, built and maintained by us: multiple datasets joined into one record per company, enriched with AI and our own analysis, and scored with succession and transaction signals that exist nowhere else. It is not a file anyone can download.
The full build is documented rather than hand-waved — how the data is built sets out every stage, and what we deliberately do not hold.
How is this different from a data subscription?
Two ways. The coverage is built for owner-managed UK companies rather than funded ones, which is the opposite end of the market from where the big platforms are strongest. And the data does not stop at the export: promote a company and it becomes a live deal with outreach, follow-up and reply triage attached to it.
A subscription hands you a list and wishes you luck. The list is where the work starts, not where it ends.
Do the emails come from you, or from me?
From you. Your name, your domain, your signature. An owner replying is replying to you, and the relationship is yours from the first word. We are not in the thread.
What stops the AI writing something that embarrasses me?
You approve every first contact before it sends. That is the message that cannot be withdrawn, going to someone you get exactly one attempt at, and it is the one place where a human glance is worth the friction.
Follow-ups and nurture run unattended, because the cost of a mistimed chaser is small and the cost of never sending one is a dead pipeline.
Do you have revenue figures?
Yes. Most owner-managed UK companies file a balance sheet without a profit and loss account, so a revenue line is frequently not there to be read — which is precisely why we built a model for it.
Our proprietary estimator reads a range of signals out of each company’s own record — balance sheet structure, asset base, employee costs and headcount, stock turn, creditor behaviour, sector margin profile — and runs several independent methods against them. Where those methods agree, you get a revenue range with a central figure. Where they diverge too far to be defensible, you get the range and no central figure, and the record says why.
A range, never a false decimal point. A single number implies a confidence that nobody estimating revenue from filings actually has, and a searcher who finds that out the hard way stops trusting the rest of the record too.
Are you a broker? Do you take a fee on the deal?
No, and no. We are paid for origination work, not for outcomes, and we hold no mandate from any seller. Nobody on the other side of your table is paying us.
Why only the UK?
Because UK statutory filing is unusually deep — accounts, officers, ownership and charges, all machine-readable at national scale. That depth is what makes the derived signals possible, and the equivalent does not exist in most other markets.
Start here
Send us your mandate. Even a rough one.
Sector, size, geography, and what you would rather avoid. We will come back with how many companies in the dataset match it — an actual number, before you commit to anything.
ishu@dealsmart.uk