Acquisition data has consequences for real companies, so our refusals are published, not negotiated deal by deal. Buyers who read this page understand exactly why our positive classifications can be trusted.
Most vendors publish what they do. We also publish what we won't — because in acquisition data, the refusals are the specification. A screen that will claim anything is a screen whose positive claims mean nothing.
Everything below binds every engagement: every tier, every custom ICP re-run, every conversation that starts with "just this once". Four principles carry the whole page.
These are markets where the end customer is a captive consumer and consolidation has documented price and access harms. Sourcing data accelerates whatever strategy holds it — so in these categories, we don't sell it.
Pet owners can't negotiate with a consolidated market. We decline the vertical.
Patient-facing consolidation with documented pricing harms. Declined.
Captive patients, opaque pricing, no exit. Declined outright.
Serves people at their most dependent. Not a sourcing market for us.
End-of-life care is not an arena for our data, full stop.
Vulnerable clients, captive demand. We decline every engagement here.
Desperation-priced demand is exactly the harm pattern we exclude.
Nobody comparison-shops an emergency. Permanently out of scope.
Residents rarely choose twice. We decline the entire category.
Captive families, local scarcity pricing. Declined without exception.
Grief is not a pricing opportunity. We decline all sourcing here.
Any engagement whose explicit strategy is local consumer pricing power is declined — whatever the vertical.
Many trades serve both a homeowner and a factory. The homeowner side can carry the same captive-customer pattern we exclude; the commercial side is a negotiation between businesses.
So for dual-sided industries the scope line runs through the middle: we screen the B2B and industrial side, and the triage pass classifies residential-focused operators out — with the reason logged, like every other exclusion.
Mixed operators are classified by their dominant published business — and the triage call is quoted, so you can dispute it with evidence rather than instinct.
Each of these is technically sellable, appears in vendor marketing, and is methodologically indefensible from website data. Every refusal is paired with the honest alternative that actually ships in our deliverables.
We never claim an owner is open to an approach or that a company is quietly for sale. No website signal supports it, and pretending otherwise poisons every other field in the dataset.
A scored measure of whether there is an identifiable, independent decision-maker to talk to — founder association, named principals, no group ownership. Every input quoted from the company's own site.
Financials are not visible on company websites. Vendors who print revenue bands estimated from page text are guessing with confidence intervals they never disclose. We decline to guess.
Stated headcount, branch footprint, fleet mentions, certifications held, recurring-program language — published facts your team can verify in one click, weighted in scoring without ever being dressed up as financials.
We do not estimate how old a founder is, guess at life stage from photos or graduation years, or predict anyone's personal timeline. Private individuals are not our data subjects.
Founder-associated, long-established, independently positioned businesses with an identifiable decision-maker and limited visible leadership bench — website-visible statements only, captured as exact quotes with source URLs.
We do not sell other people's bad days. Signals about business health are limited to what companies choose to publish — nothing scraped from court dockets or credit whispers.
The most recent dated content on the site — news, projects, certifications with issue years — showing whether a company is visibly active or visibly dormant. Checkable, neutral, and honest about what it is.
Standards that can't be counted are marketing. These can be checked against any deliverable we've ever shipped.
The 10% figure is measured, not estimated: in the published specimen run, roughly one in ten otherwise-perfect candidates was excluded because its own website disclosed group ownership. Each one appears in the exclusion log with the disclosing quote.
Most M&A in the segments we serve is succession, capability-building, or market entry — an owner handing over a life's work, a strategic filling a gap, a manufacturer finding distribution. That work deserves better data.
But a subset of consolidation strategies depends on customers who cannot negotiate or leave, and data products make those strategies faster too. Drawing this line removes the category where the harm pattern is documented and the end customer has no exit.
Buyers occasionally ask us to cross the line. The answer lives on this page precisely so nobody has to ask twice — and so the answer doesn't depend on the size of the cheque attached to the question.
This is not a claim of virtue. It's a scoping decision: we serve B2B markets where the counterparty is a business that can negotiate, and we put the refusal in writing so it binds us later.
Vendors who claim to detect intent from web data are either guessing or profiling people. Either way, a buyer can't audit the claim — and a claim you can't audit contaminates the ones you could.
We built the method so every claim traces to a sentence a company wrote about itself. That constraint costs us some marketable claims and buys the only thing that matters in data: you can check our work.
Succession-driven theses are legitimate — most of the market we serve runs on them. What's not legitimate is dressing up guesses about private individuals as data. So our succession framing is exactly one sentence long.
"Founder-associated, long-established, independently positioned businesses with an identifiable decision-maker and limited visible leadership bench" — website-visible signals, never inferred personal circumstances.
Every specimen report ships in an 8 / 5 / 5 / 2 format: eight top fits, five keyword-missed fits, five documented exclusions, two insufficient-evidence cases. Below are real exclusion entries from published specimen runs, anonymized for this page.
Why show you the rejects? Because a list with no visible exclusions is unauditable. When you can see who we removed and why, you can trust who we kept — that's the entire trade, and it's why the exclusion log ships in every tier.
This page reads like ethics, but it cashes out as workflow: fewer dead conversations, cleaner memos, and a dataset your IC can interrogate.
Every inclusion and exclusion carries a quote and a URL, so your associates verify claims in minutes — and your IC memo cites evidence, not a vendor's confidence score. The method page shows the mechanics.
The one-in-ten group-owned candidates never reach your outreach list — they're documented out. Your first call goes to an independent operator with a named decision-maker, not a subsidiary's switchboard.
Nothing in our deliverables needs a disclaimer, because nothing is estimated. When a lender, LP, or counterparty asks where a data point came from, the answer is a sentence the company published itself.
Asked by deal teams before engagement — answered here so the scope conversation starts honest.
The specimen report shows this standard applied to a real universe — every excluded company included, with the sentence that disqualified it.
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