ExitRadar: UK businesses to buy

Most good small businesses are never advertised. They change hands when the owner retires, and the buyer who hears first is the one who asked. ExitRadar finds those businesses before they reach a broker.

We read the Companies House record of every active UK limited company and rate which ones look worth buying and which owners show signs of being ready to sell: directors nearing retirement, long tenure, a single owner running the business, changes in ownership. Every company we rate worth approaching has been checked and cleared: not a subsidiary, a holding shell, a property vehicle, recently sold or dormant.

Ask in plain English. "I want to buy an engineering business in the West Midlands." "Which care businesses in the North West have owners close to retirement?" "How old are the owners of UK construction firms?" You get anonymised target cards (sector, region, EBITDA band, the age band of the oldest director and an Exit Score band) and published sector figures: how old the owners are, how many run the business alone, and how many targets each region holds.

No account, no sign-in, nothing personal from you. Cards never name a company: names are on ExitRadar, where a free trial includes free reports, and the signed-in ExitRadar connector brings the full reports into the chat.

For first-time buyers and searchers, buy-and-build platforms looking for bolt-ons, business brokers and advisers looking for sellers, and trade buyers.