The owners most likely to sell haven’t listed anything yet.
SuccessionScope reads the entire UK Companies House register — companies, officers, PSC ownership, filing events, charges — passes every active private SME through a qualification gate, and ranks the survivors by succession priority: owner age and tenure, ownership concentration, board behaviour, urgency signals. The top 50 in your industry thesis arrive as a client-ready report.
First thesis shipping now: UK logistics & freight (SIC 49–53). Manufacturing next. Custom SIC sets on request.
A gate, then a ranking. Every number explained.
First a qualification gate with few, true disqualifiers — strike-off markers, corporate-group ownership, dormant accounts, no live board. Then survivors are ranked by priority: succession exposure × data confidence × buyer fit, dampened (never deleted) by transaction complexity. The breakdown is the product — it survives contact with an investment committee.
The controlling owner from the PSC register where one is named, else the oldest active director — ramping continuously from 55 to 75+. Month/year of birth only, shown as five-year bands. Age creates eligibility, never intent.
Behaviour, not demography: directors leaving without replacement, a fresh auditor or registered office, a shortened accounting period, security satisfied with none created. Events pick this month’s calls.
The longest-serving active director’s years at the table, from ten to twenty-five. Decades of unbroken control usually mean the founder still holds the pen.
Who actually owns it, from the PSC register — reported in bands, with trusts and protected records, so it is scored as a confidence, never a yes/no.
No director under 45 appointed in five years. A successor may exist off the register, so this signal is deliberately modest.
A balance-sheet bundle from the filed iXBRL accounts — net-asset level and three-year trend, cash against creditors, headcount, asset base, filing hygiene. UK small-company filings carry no turnover or profit, and none is ever estimated: where accounts are missing, attractiveness is reported as unknown, not invented.
Starts at a hundred; ownership layers, crowded cap tables and charge churn subtract. Ordinary bank security costs nothing. Complexity dampens a target’s priority — it never deletes it.
How much the register actually told us — owner age, ownership, filing history, charges, filed accounts. All four data axes are ingested; where any is missing the number drops instead of being guessed. Every company here also passed the qualification gate.
Thesis in. Fifty targets out. Five working days.
You define the thesis
Sector by SIC codes, optional regions, exclusions. Logistics & freight is live; any UK SIC set can be configured. One email is enough — we’ll shape it with you.
We gate and rank the register
Every active private company in your thesis is filtered from 5.7M register rows, enriched with officers, PSC ownership, filing events, charges and filed iXBRL accounts, passed through the qualification gate and ranked by succession priority.
You get the report
A branded PDF: the top 50 qualified targets by priority, each with its four axes and per-signal breakdown, registered localities, a plain-English methodology page — plus a CSV appendix for your CRM.
“A score indicates statistical similarity to typical pre-succession profiles. It is not a claim that any company or person intends to sell.” — printed on the methodology page of every report
- Built exclusively on official public registers (Companies House). No scraping, no bought lists, no email-finding.
- Director ages are processed as month/year only and shown only as five-year bands — never an exact age or date of birth.
- Every report carries its lawful-basis note and a removal-request contact, honoured within five working days.
One thesis, one report, €500.
Concierge pilot pricing while the first sector theses ship. If the report doesn’t give you conversations worth having, tell us why and don’t come back — that’s the deal.
- 50 qualified off-market targets in your sector thesis, ranked by priority
- Four axes + per-signal breakdown for every company — defensible in front of a committee
- CSV appendix ready for your CRM or outreach tooling
- Methodology page with honest caveats and lawful-basis note
- One revision of exclusions and region filters included
- Delivery in 5 working days from thesis confirmation
Opens an email to umut.bakin@torquefoundry.com with a short thesis template. No account, no subscription, no call required.
The short answers
Where does the data come from?
Two official sources only: the Companies House bulk register snapshot (refreshed monthly) and the Companies House public API for officer records. Nothing scraped, nothing bought, nothing private.
Is this GDPR-compliant?
The pipeline processes public-register data under legitimate interest, stores director births as month/year only (exactly as Companies House publishes them), reports ages only as five-year bands, and every report names a removal-request contact. The methodology page states plainly what a score is and is not.
Can a score tell me an owner wants to sell?
No — and we print that on every report. A score measures similarity to typical pre-succession profiles from public filings. It tells you where a respectful, well-timed conversation is most likely to be worth having. The conversation is still yours to have.
What sectors can you cover?
Any UK sector definable by SIC codes. Logistics & freight (SIC 49–53) ships now, manufacturing is configured next, and a custom thesis takes about a day to set up before the standard five-day delivery.