SuccessionScope reads the whole UK register — every filing, every director, every year of silence — and scores each private company on how closely it resembles a business about to change hands. This edition: fifty off-market targets for Logistics & Freight, ranked, with the working shown.
Sample edition — synthetic companies, not real registrants
Report № 000 — Sample SIC 49xxx–53xxx Mandate model v2.2.0 Pressed July 2026
Synthetic companies generated60
Scored by the engine60
Ranked into this sample edition50
Click any company for its full signal breakdown.
Director ages appear as five-year bands only, as provided by the public register. The full edition ships with a CSV appendix of every field above.
Every point in every score traces to a public filing at Companies House. The breakdown is the product — you can check our working, and you should.
The calendar is still the strongest signal, but it is read properly now: the controlling owner from the PSC register where one is named, the oldest active director where not, ramping smoothly from 55 to 75 and beyond. Month-and-year of birth as the register provides it, never a full date. Age makes a company eligible; it proves nothing about intent.
The longest-serving active director's years at the table, from ten to twenty-five. Decades of unbroken control usually mean the founder is still holding the pen.
Who actually owns it, from the PSC register — reported in bands, with trusts, corporate holders and protected records, so it is scored as a confidence, never a yes/no. A 40% founder with passive family around the table is still a mandate.
If no director under 45 has been appointed in five years, nobody visible is being groomed for the chair. A successor may exist off the register — so this signal is deliberately modest.
Behaviour, not demography: directors leaving without replacement, a fresh auditor or registered-office change, a shortened accounting period, security satisfied with none created. Age creates the population; events pick this month's calls.
The company's own filed balance sheet, read as a bundle: net-asset level and trend, cash against creditors, headcount, asset base, filing hygiene. UK small-company filings are filleted — the public record carries no income-statement figures of any kind, and none are shown or estimated here. No accounts data reads as unknown, never as a low number.
Starts at a hundred and subtracts for ownership layers, crowded cap tables, charge churn and status markers. Carrying ordinary bank security costs nothing. Complexity dampens a target's priority — it never deletes it, because a complicated sale is precisely when an adviser earns the fee.
How much the register actually told us — owner age, ownership, filing history, charges, accounts. A company with no filed accounts data caps at 85: what we don't know lowers the number, it is never guessed. Every company here has also passed a qualification gate: no strike-off markers, no corporate-group ownership, no dormant accounts, a live board.
“A score indicates statistical similarity to typical pre-succession profiles. It is not a claim that any company or person intends to sell.”
Tell us the industry and the region. Within five working days you receive this report for your thesis — fifty scored, off-market UK targets as a branded PDF with the CSV appendix. €500, once. No subscription, no platform, no seat licence.
This report is compiled exclusively from official public-register data (Companies House, UK). Processing relies on legitimate interest in prioritising business-development research. Scores are prioritisation aids, not predictions. Director ages appear only as bands, never as exact ages or dates of birth. Directors and companies may request removal from future editions at umut.bakin@torquefoundry.com.