A wayleave is the right to cross land you do not own.
Private origination for mid-market private equity
Every operatorin your market,identified.
Named, owned and sized. A private instance built on the 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 carrying the market economics your investment committee will ask for.
The problem
Why buy on-market when you can buy off-market?
Broker processes deliver assets already shaped, priced and shopped. Proprietary origination is where the return is, and every firm knows it. What stops it is the work: a large multi-site market carries well over ten thousand premises, several thousand operating companies, and an ownership picture buried under holding structures no list vendor unwinds.
It is a research problem before it is a relationship problem. That is why it rarely gets done, and it is not for want of appetite. The work does not scale from a deal team and it has to be redone for every market. 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: once per market, in two weeks, for one fund.
A normalised exemplar market
From one completed Book. A single UK market, enumerated in full, not sampled.
Every firm in one market, by class.
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, recorded once and treated as final. 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.
Underwriting Inputs.
The assumptions your model actually needs, drawn from the whole market rather than a sample: firm size distribution, unit economics by scale, growth and margin by size band.
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.
In detail
Exhaustive enumeration.
Every operator identified and resolved to a verified corporate identity, not a name on a directory. One completed market runs to roughly 2,900 firms, around 2,570 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. Underwriting Inputs
Built to underwrite from, not just to prospect from.
Enumerating every operator and pulling filed accounts across all of them produces something a target list cannot: the actual shape of the market. Your team can underwrite a thesis off a Book, size the platform, model the roll-up and take it to IC. The acquirable universe comes with it.
Distributions, not averages.
Revenue and EBITDA across the full universe, by size band and by geography, so you can see where the earnings actually sit.
Margin benchmarks.
Built from filed figures across every operator in the market rather than from a sample of five conversations.
Implied multiples.
Where transactions are visible, what the market has actually paid, and for what quality of asset.
Fragmentation, measured.
Consolidation dynamics quantified rather than asserted, with the hub and spoke structure of the market mapped.
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 receptivity.
Owner age, tenure, succession position and exit setup indicate who is likely to engage, 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.
The cockpit
The Cockpit = 01 + 02 + 03
Deployed privately for your firm alone, on your market alone, behind authentication, with a named login per partner. Not a shared database. Not a product with other tenants in it.
Hub candidates, ranked
Click a hub for its catchment profile, then add up to three to compare side by side.
Five tabs
Underwriting inputs.
A partner-grade account of how every number was reached, and what the map cannot see.
Map.
Catchment and hub-and-spoke view, so the team orients geographically before reading a table.
Candidates.
The ranked universe with a full filter suite, thousands collapsed to a conversation-sized list in seconds, evidence one click behind every row.
Shortlist.
Two stages by design: any partner stages a firm, either promotes it to actively worked, agreement visible.
Pipeline.
A CRM over the promoted set: status ladder, deal owner, next action, note log with author and timestamp.
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.”
Delivery
Two weeks from brief to instance.
You name the market. The universe is enumerated, resolved, traced, sized, scored and mapped, and the instance is deployed with your partners' logins. Refreshes fold new data in without disturbing your shortlist or your pipeline history. Your picks and your call notes are yours, and are never overwritten by a data run.
We agree the market definition, the acquisition profile and the boundaries of the universe. One conversation.
The universe is enumerated from primary sources, ownership resolved, earnings sized, geography scored. You see the enumeration before the enrichment.
The instance opens to your team with the methodology documented and a walkthrough for the people who will use it.
Wayleave Partners
Small by design.
You meet the person who builds it. No business development function, no associate layer, no offshore data team. The method is the product, and it is run by the person who built it.
Will Escott Hammond, Founder
Private equity investor and operator. Thirty-plus acquisitions led or supported. Part of the three-person team that built a UK early-years platform from inception to circa 50 sites and a £178m exit. Builds the data and automation infrastructure himself.
Backing
Backed by the people it is built for.
Wayleave is privately held, funded by its founder and by two Partners at UK mid-market private equity funds who invested personally after using the platform.
Bring us a market.
If it is large, 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.