Go brokerless.
For Entrepreneurship-Through-Acquisition searchers
Find the companies no one else is talking to, then buy and run your first UK business without a broker.
- Find off-market owners with the Brokerless Company Search Engine
- Work through real problems on weekly calls with other searchers doing the same
- Do the search a broker would bill £60,000 to £100,000 for
Takes about five minutes. If you're a fit, you'll be invited to apply or book an intro call.
I fired my broker and built the tool that replaced him.
A seat
- Seats
- Fewer than ten per cohort
- Format
- Twelve weeks of calls
- Included
- Full access to the search engine
- Founding cohort
- Full, starts October 2026
- Next cohort
- Applications open now, dates still to be set
What actually slows a first search down
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Web search alone misses great businesses.
Plenty of profitable, owner-managed businesses have traded for decades without ever needing a website, so they never surface in a web search. Rely on Google to build your list and you'll overlook some of the best ones, which were never up for sale to begin with.
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Building the list eats your evenings.
Even when you know where to look, assessing companies is slow. Looking each one up on Companies House, judging it against your criteria, then opening its website to work out what the business actually does can take weeks. A SIC code and a company number tell you almost nothing. Most companies get discarded, so the list grows slowly.
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Getting a reply is harder than building the list.
You can have two hundred names and still be stuck. Letters go to the registered office, which is often an accountant's address rather than the place the owner actually works. Emails go unanswered, and you have no way of knowing whether that is normal or whether your approach is wrong. So you end up asking accountants who might be selling, one coffee at a time.
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You pay the broker whether or not you buy.
A broker's fee grows with the size of the company you buy. Even on a small business it can reach £100,000. A buy-side retainer runs every month for as long as your search does, and the success fee on top is a percentage. Ask what that percentage is calculated on. If it is the target's turnover rather than the price you actually pay, a low-margin business costs you far more in fees than a better one bought for the same money. That is a corporate buyer's cost structure applied to a first deal.
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No one around you has done this.
Often your friends and family don't understand the search, let alone know how to help. The owners across the table negotiate for themselves, and most UK searchers fall back on American advice written for different rules.
Find the companies that never show up online
It runs over the whole Companies House register, with filed accounts and official owner data joined to every company that has them. That is how it surfaces the old, profitable, owner-managed businesses the usual tools miss.
The Brokerless Company Search Engine
Narrow the whole register to your thesis
- Only the area you'd work in
- Postcode and radius
- Only your sector
- SIC code
- Owners likely to sell
- Owner age and tenure
- A size you can buy
- Headcount, accounts size, filed figures
- Established firms, not start-ups
- Company age
Tell at a glance if it's worth a call
- What it does
- A plain-English description
- What it sells
- Its key offerings, listed separately
- Who owns it, and for how long
- Owner names, ages and tenure
- How it's doing
- Employees, net assets, cash, turnover, profit
- Where to find it
- Its real address, not the one on Companies House
- Where to look it up
- Website and LinkedIn page
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Put in your thesis
A sector, a place, a type of company, and get a real target list back in minutes. Change one filter and run it again, so a thesis that turns out thin costs you an afternoon rather than a month.
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Filter to owners likely to sell
Owner age and tenure point you at the businesses closest to changing hands.
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Qualify before you make contact
Net assets, turnover and cash position, read straight from public filings.
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See which ones are worth a call
Companies come back described in plain English, alongside their key offerings. Read a hundred in one sitting without opening a tab, and save your own research for the handful that fit your thesis.
By hand this is evenings of filtering, reading filings and opening one homepage after another to work out what each company even does. It is also the part a broker charges a monthly retainer to take off you. With Brokerless it runs while you make a coffee, and the list stays yours.
A cohort to get moving, a community to stay in
Brokerless is a cohort of fewer than ten that gets you moving, then a community you stay in. You also get the search engine, which other UK acquisition courses don't offer, and all of it is built for the UK, not the American playbook.
What a seat is
Twelve weeks of calls with fewer than ten searchers, and full access to the search engine. The weeks follow the sequence itself: a sector thesis, then a named list, then conversations with owners who were not expecting to sell. What happens inside them gets shaped around what each cohort is stuck on, rather than handed down from a syllabus.
The founding cohort is full and starts in October 2026. Applications for the next cohort are open now, and its dates are still to be set.
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Find the business
You build a real target list with the search engine, screened to your exact criteria, so you never pour weeks into a company that was never a fit.
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Get to a deal
The weekly sessions are where outreach gets fixed.
What to send, how often to follow up, how to reach the trading address rather than the registered one, and what a reply rate actually looks like, so you can tell a bad list from a bad letter.
You learn it alongside other searchers working on the same problem in the same week. That is the understanding a first-time buyer cannot outsource, and it runs through first meetings and terms too. For the specialist parts, Brokerless is lining up UK financing and legal advisers to introduce you to.
You keep control, the owner relationship and a real grasp of your own deal. You pay a membership fee, never a broker's cut of what you buy.
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Own it
A broker is gone the moment they're paid. Your Brokerless cohort stays. Complete a deal and you join the owners' group Brokerless is building, for the next set of challenges that come with running the business.
Who a seat is for
You don't need a thesis yet. If you haven't started, or you've started but can't get a list together, take the readiness check: we'll work out your deal criteria with you. If you already have them, even better. If you have been meaning to start since last year, this is not the cohort that fixes that.
- You are buying to run the business yourself, not as an asset for someone else to run.
- You can name a figure and where it is coming from. An intention to raise is not funding.
- You have cleared time for it: a few hours a week, starting now.
- You can say how many owners you have spoken to so far. Zero is a fine answer.
- You can say what is actually stopping you, in your own words.
- You are buying in the UK, and you can make a weekly call.
If you are buying on behalf of a fund or a vehicle, say so when you apply. It is not a no, but the cohort is about becoming an owner-operator and there may be a better fit for you.
Free Readiness CheckTakes about five minutes. If you're a fit, you'll be invited to apply or book an intro call.
I fired my broker and built the tool that replaced him.
He charged thousands a month, qualified nothing, and talked over me and the sellers until owners started to ghost him. So I built the tool that finds the companies and puts me in front of owners directly. It has taken me into negotiations with companies I doubt he would ever have found, and it is the same one your cohort now runs.
Built on my own search
Who runs this
I'm Mark Steele. I spent twenty years in technology, starting technical before moving into project management, then IT operations, running teams of dozens of people and tens of millions in revenue a year. I left that comfortable existence to buy and run a business of my own. What I did not expect was how lonely the search can be. Connecting and working alongside other searchers showed me the things I didn't know I didn't know, and stopped me chasing bad deals. Brokerless is two things: the search engine I built to find companies, and a community I'm forming so others don't have to do it alone. I run the weekly calls, but the people you will lean on most are the other searchers going brokerless alongside you.
PS: I'm still on my own search. If you're looking to sell a profitable London-based IT services business, I'd love to talk.
Ready to go brokerless?
The broker leaves at completion. Your cohort does not. Find your own targets, get owners talking, close the deal on your terms, and keep the people around you long after.
Free Readiness CheckTakes about five minutes. If you're a fit, you'll be invited to apply or book an intro call.
Hand-picked cohorts of fewer than ten. Applications close as soon as the seats are filled.