When your client says 'I'm thinking about selling', who do you call?

A confidential referral programme for accountants, lawyers, financial advisers and growth partners. Introduce founders considering a sale of their essential services, healthcare or building services business and earn 15 to 20 percent of our success fee on completion, backed by a written referral agreement and NDA.

As a trusted advisory firm, platform or network operator, you are often the first person they call to discuss selling their company. That is a responsibility.

Your client trusts you because you have earned it across years of tax returns, restructures, contracts and succession planning. So when they finally say the words, 'I think I am ready to sell', your recommendation carries weight.

Recommending the wrong M&A advisor is not just a deal risk. It is a reputational one. The wrong process erodes trust you spent a decade building.

We built this programme to be the firm you can recommend without hesitation. We work within your conduct rules, brief you weekly, and treat your client like our most important one, because to you, they are.

Direct introduction

20%

You pick up the phone and introduce the owner to us by name. Highest rate, because the client arrives warm and already trusts the recommendation.

Ambient referral

15%

An owner reaches us through your link or the valuation tool on your website without you lifting a finger. Still your referral, still paid to you.

A £5m transaction introduced directly pays £40,000. Direct introductions above £20m in transaction value earn £120,000 or more, rising to £320,000 at the top of the scale.

Five scenarios from a real client book.

Imagine a business owner in your network who is exploring a sale in the next 12 months and wants the right partner and the right expert advisor. Here is how each referral plays out, and the exact email you would send.

Confirmed in writing.

Every introduction is confirmed back to you by email within 24 hours and logged against your firm.

18-month attribution.

Your introduction is attributed to you for 18 months, whether or not you have signed the Referral Agreement at the time you make it.

You stay in control.

We never contact a business owner you have flagged until you tell us to.

A contract you can read right now.

Fees are paid on completion under the written Referral Agreement, published in full below. No surprises at the finish line.

We do not circumvent you

Our engagement is the valuation, the improvement plan and, if the owner chooses, the sale. Whatever that owner already buys from you stays with you. Where the report surfaces work that sits in your field, we name you as the person to speak to. The referral agreement records that you are the introducing adviser and stay the introducing adviser.

The relationship stays yours

You remain the trusted adviser. We report to the owner and, where they permit it, we keep you in the loop. We never position ourselves as a replacement for the firm that introduced us.

Your list is not our list

We do not market to your clients, your subscribers or your members. Nobody enters our outbound programme because they used your widget. The only contact is about the report they asked for.

You can see every referral

Attribution is logged server side the moment a visitor enters a website address. First touch wins, permanently, with no expiry window. Your partner dashboard shows every referral and its stage in real time.

How we handle the data, stated plainly

• - Nothing moves without the owner ticking a consent box inside the questionnaire, naming the type of help they want.
• - You receive the owner's name, company and the nature of the need. You never receive the report, the figures or the valuation.
• - If the owner declines, you are told nothing and the referral simply continues as normal.
• - We hold and process everything under our privacy policy, and we do not use owner inputs to train external models.

Retain the client relationship.

Keeping your client in-house through a sale process protects recurring audit, management-accounts and legal fees that are otherwise lost when a founder moves to a transaction-side firm.

Add transaction-linked revenue.

Post-introduction, you remain the incumbent adviser on tax structuring, completion accounts, SPA review and post-close integration workstreams. Acquirers frequently retain the incumbent adviser through the transition period. And where buyer-side workstreams arise across our network, partner firms are introduced first.

Share in the success fee.

15% on ambient referrals and 20% on direct introductions of our completion fee, in addition to any advisory work you continue to bill directly.

Example acquirers on our desk.

A live, mapped buyer network across strategic, financial and independent capital. Named counterparties are shared under NDA once a mandate is signed.

Three steps, from first call to first introduction.

Start here

Book a 30 minute confidential discovery call.

Held with our partners desk. Covers economics, attribution, sector fit and the Referral Agreement. No obligation to proceed.

Can your firm accept this fee? Yes. Here is how.

Regulated professionals can receive referral fees with informed client consent and written disclosure. Most firms use one of three routes. Route one: an advance consent paragraph in your engagement letter stating the likely fee range. Route two: a specific consent letter per referral, signed before the introduction proceeds. Route three: rebate the fee to your client, or waive it entirely, and refer because the outcome is right. We provide the client consent and disclosure templates for all three routes, compatible with RQ, the referral platform ICAEW offers its members. Growth and hiring agencies without a professional conduct framework can skip this section entirely.