Bespoke origination for private equity
Named, owned and sized. A bespoke direct origination platform built for any market you choose, delivered in two weeks. Not a list: the entire acquirable universe resolved to ultimate ownership, sized on earnings, mapped by geography and proximity, carrying the market economics and the target criteria your commercial strategy demands.
The problem
Why buy on-market when you can buy off-market?
Proprietary origination is where the returns are, and we all know it. What stops it is the work: thousands of operating companies, ownership buried under holding structures, and a job that does not scale from a deal team. The usual answer is an analyst, a subscription and six weeks, producing a list that is stale before it is finished. Wayleave is the other answer: a fully enumerated origination platform, delivered in two weeks.
The deliverable
Your Library. One Book per market.
Each market you commission becomes a Book in your firm's Library. Open a Book and the whole instance changes with it: the map, the candidates, the pipeline, the findings. Books are named at sector level here; the specific markets stay redacted.
What you get
Three things, and what they add up to.
We call the deliverable a Book, short for Domesday Book, after the 1085 survey of England: every holding, every holder, every valuation, settled in one place. Where Domesday closed the day it was finished, yours stays open, kept current. One market, one Book.
The Market Map.
The complete acquirable universe. Every operator named and resolved to a verified corporate identity, with ownership traced through holding structures to the individuals who decide.
Additional Outputs.
What else the Book generates: the input assumptions your model needs, the market analysed from the bottom up, consolidators tracked as they buy, and outreach tested rather than guessed.
The Approach.
The outreach drafted for every firm worth approaching: who it goes to, how they are reached, and what it says, built from what the record shows about that business. Written, not templated.
An exemplar market
From WY-16, the first Book in the platform above: one UK market, counted and verified firm by firm, not sampled.
Every firm in one market, by class.
01. The Market Mapped
Exhaustive enumeration.
Every operator identified and resolved to a verified corporate identity, not a name on a directory. One completed market runs to 2,884 firms, 2,571 of them still independent.
Ownership traced to the individual.
Shareholdings followed through holding companies to the ultimate beneficial owners, structure recorded rather than asserted. You see who actually has to say yes.
Consolidator mapping.
Who else is buying, what they have already taken, and which assets are contested rather than open. Detected from ownership movement, not press coverage.
Earnings, estimated or actuals firm by firm.
Filed figures where they exist, benchmarks from that market's own filers where they do not. Every figure carries its basis and confidence.
Geography that answers where to build.
Drive-time catchments, demand density, hub-and-spoke segmentation and territory scoring, ending in a written verdict on where to found a platform.
Contact routes, sourced.
Physical, digital and correspondence details per firm, with the signals that indicate a receptive owner: age, tenure, succession position, exit setup.
02. Additional Outputs
What else a Book generates.
A Book is built to be worked from, not just prospected from. Enumerating every operator and sizing all of them produces the input assumptions your team underwrites with, and it keeps producing: the market analysed from the bottom up, consolidators tracked as they buy, and outreach tested rather than guessed. The acquirable universe comes with it.
Input assumptions.
Revenue and EBITDA distributions across the full universe, margin benchmarks and implied multiples, built from filed figures and visible transactions, so the model starts from the market rather than from a sample.
Financials, filed or estimated.
Filed figures where they exist. Where they do not, proxy-led statistical estimates from that market's own filers, each carrying its basis and its confidence.
Market analysis, from the bottom up.
Trends read from site-level data and aggregated to whatever level you need, with demand and supply scored by territory as the data refreshes, so growth assumptions rest on where demand actually runs ahead.
The consolidatable market, sized.
Every firm that could be bought, classed as platform, bolt-on or watch, with acquirable EBITDA totalled against your criteria, platforms first, and succession counted.
Consolidators, tracked.
Who else is buying, what they have bought and when, kept current as ownership moves, so a contested asset is known before the first call.
Outreach, A/B tested.
Approaches go out in variants and are measured by reply, so the message that works in that market is the one your team keeps sending.
The alternative is a commissioned market study, which costs more, takes longer, and does not hand you the acquirable universe at the end of it.
03. The Approach
The first approach, already drafted.
Knowing who to approach is half the work. The other half is the approach itself, and it is where most origination programmes stall: a partner opens a list of two thousand names and writes nothing. So the outreach comes drafted. One per firm worth approaching, addressed to the owner by name, on the route most likely to reach them, drawn from what the record shows about that business and that person rather than assembled from a template with the name swapped.
Addressed to the decision-maker.
Not the switchboard and not a general enquiry route. The owner the ownership trace identified, with the contact route most likely to land.
Written from the record.
What the business does, how long they have held it, what the filings show. Specific enough that it reads as a considered approach rather than a circular.
Ordered by fit, then receptivity.
Fit to your target profile first: earnings scale, proximity to a platform and your investment strategy. Then owner age, tenure, succession position and exit setup, so your team starts where the odds are best rather than at the top of the alphabet.
Your team sends it, under your name. The relationship is yours from the first line.
What they said
From Partners who have run it.
“I have not seen anything like this in private equity. No UK firm I know of has this capability in-house today. It turns a market you would otherwise spend six weeks guessing at into something you can work on Monday morning.”
“It blew us away. The depth is the thing: not a list of names, but every owner in the market traced back to the person who has to sign. I have never had a view of a market like it.”
Bring us a market.
If it is fragmented and multi-site, it can be mapped. Tell us the market and the acquisition profile and we will tell you the size of the universe before you commit to anything. The first conversation is about whether the market is worth the work, not about the platform.
will@wayleavepartners.comLondon based, working UK-wide.