Tuesday morning. My team was going through a list of about 550 small companies with a buyer.
We got to a family business none of us had ever spoken to.
All we had was a public filing. One person had stopped controlling the company, and on the same date, a woman had started.
Our guess: she's probably a widow.
We'd never met the family. But a date on a form told us who might want to sell and roughly why, before anyone picked up a phone. It cost nothing.
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Who sells, and when
Most people look for businesses that are already for sale. The ones worth finding usually aren't listed, and their owners aren't thinking about selling today.
Last issue I said good outreach makes you the person an owner remembers on the day their answer changes.
So how do you work out whose answer is about to change?
There's way more public information on this than people think. This is what my team looks at, and it's the same list I'm building for my own search.
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Who might sell
How old is the owner? On one mandate, I told my team to only go after owners above 50. In the UK, the company register gives you a director's birth month and year. Everywhere else, a graduation year on LinkedIn gets you close.
Is anyone taking over? Find the owner's kids on LinkedIn. If they've built a life in another country, the business probably has a succession problem. If one of them already works there, it's a different conversation.
How long have they been doing it? Check when they became a director, and whether they're listed as founder or manager. A founder who's been at it for decades has a very different relationship with the business than a manager who came in later.
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When they might sell
Did the ownership just change? That's the widow. On the same list, control of another company had moved to the man in his sixties who runs it. His wife or daughter had either died or just left. We couldn't tell. Either way, he now carries it alone.
Did a debt just get cleared? Filings show loans secured against a company, and when they're paid off. One owner on that list had just cleared what was owed to his old co-founder. A business with less owed against it is an easier business to sell.
Has the business gone quiet? Look at how often they hire, whether headcount has moved in years, and whether the balance sheet is doing anything. A flat line can mean an owner who's stopped pushing and is running it on autopilot.
Are they paying their bills on time? An adviser in Italy told me he can pull a company's accounts in about a minute, plus a credit report on whether it pays on time compared to similar companies. A business that's starting to pay late has an owner with something on his mind.
Is a tax deadline coming? One buyer I know walks owners through what selling before a tax change saves them. A rule change gives someone a reason to decide this year instead of someday.
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The asterisks
These are guesses. The filing never said anyone died. We said that.
A signal isn't a yes. Plenty of 70-year-olds with no successor will never sell. You're deciding who to talk to first, nothing more.
Data goes stale. Whatever you find, recheck it before you act on it. We do this every time, because some of it is always out of date.
Never say what you found. Use this to decide who to write to, not what to write. Nobody wants a letter from a stranger who's noticed their husband is gone.
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What you can steal
You can do this tonight with no money and no deal.
Pick 10 businesses in one town and one industry. Make a sheet with five columns: owner's name, rough age, how long they've run it, where the kids are, anything that changed recently.
For Indian companies, the MCA filing costs ₹100. UK filings are free on Companies House. LinkedIn does the rest, and AI can do the first pass, though expect it to find owners for maybe a third of your list.
The ones with the most boxes pointing the same way go to the top.
Now you have a real list, built on something other than who happens to be for sale.
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Where that leaves me
Five seller calls in a month is the target.
Two weeks in: 1 of 5.
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One word
She's real. I've left out the name, the sector and the country.
Would you write to her?
Yes or no. Hit reply, I read everything.
– Dev
P.S. - Most of sourcing is guessing well about someone's life, then checking before you act on it.
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Selling a business? [email protected] - tell me what it does and what it makes.
Want the Indian deals themselves? That's Kautilya's India Deal Sheet — what's actually for sale, every week.
Further along, and want someone to source deals for you? https://kautilya.pe/
