Confidentiality & safety

How the secret is kept.

Many owners delay this conversation not over valuation but over the fear that exploring a sale will leak – to employees, customers, competitors – and change the company before any decision is made. Here is the architecture, in plain language.

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You can start this conversation without identifying your company. We sign an NDA before you disclose anything.

Home → How we work → Confidentiality & safety Most relevant nextWhere disclosure is staged in the processYour management team and employeesWhere you stand
Who knows what, when

Disclosure is staged. Nothing sensitive moves before it should.

Stage 1Anonymous profileWho knows: Buyers who could rationally want the company.What moves: A two-page teaser without the name. Nothing that identifies you.
Stage 2NDA signedWho knows: Buyers who asked to know more, in writing.What moves: Your name. The memorandum. Still no customer names, no code, no contracts.
Stage 3Management meetingsWho knows: Buyers who made an indication we took seriously.What moves: You, in the room, on a script agreed before market. Questions logged; answers consistent.
Stage 4Data room, in wavesWho knows: Buyers in confirmatory diligence – usually one or two.What moves: Contracts, customers and code opened in waves, most-sensitive last, watermarked and tracked.
Day oneYour peopleWho knows: Told by you, in a sequence you planned.What moves: Never by a rumour. The sequence is designed before market, not on the day.

How we run it Disclosure is staged so that nothing sensitive moves before it should. A leak protocol is agreed before market.

Approached by us on behalf of a buyer? What we hold about you, and how to stop the conversation, is on this page.

Before anyone knows anything

  • Your company is code-named from day one.

    In working papers, internal systems and every buyer communication – the project has a name, and it isn't yours. Formal legal documents identify the parties where required for the document's purpose.

  • We disclose your identity to no prospective buyer before a signed NDA.

    Unless you expressly authorise a different approach. First contact is a blind profile: designed to establish relevance for a serious buyer without intentionally identifying the company.

  • Disclosure is staged.

    Blind profile → NDA → named teaser → data room in tranches, each stage earning the next. A buyer who exits in week three has seen a fraction of what a buyer in week twelve has seen – deliberately. How the stages sit inside a process is chapter 1 of the reference.

  • What the NDA binds – them, and us.

    The NDA defines who inside a buyer may receive information, which advisers are admitted, and what the information may be used for; its confidentiality obligations survive a buyer's exit on its terms, and materials are returned or destroyed as it provides. What binds us comes first: we will sign an NDA with you before you disclose anything – before any engagement, if you wish.

Universes sized to the risk

For companies that could be identified from a small number of characteristics, we run deliberately small universes – sometimes a handful of parties. The count of buyers contacted is an outcome of the confidentiality analysis, never a number to boast about. We are prouder of our smallest buyer list than our largest.

Where even a narrow named process carries disproportionate exposure, there are quieter, lower-disclosure ways to test assumptions before any formal market outreach – designed case by case, with your permission governing every step, and only where your profile cannot be reverse-engineered from what is shared.

Inside your company

The internal circle is kept deliberately small – as small as your governance and the transaction allow – and expanded only as the process requires, with the timing planned alongside you. Where a CFO or key manager must be inside, we help you script when and how, because a rumour reaching your team from a buyer's junior analyst is a failure we design against, not an accident we apologise for.

If something leaks anyway

Prevention manages the risk; it does not abolish it. So the response is designed before market, not improvised on the day. What it covers:

The triggerWhat counts as an incident – a customer question, a competitor’s remark, an employee’s message – and who inside the company and the firm hears about it first, within the hour.
The first 24 hoursWho speaks, to whom, in what order: your team, your key customers, the buyers in process – from a script agreed before market.
The buyersWhat each buyer is told, and what the leak changes about the process calendar – sometimes nothing, sometimes a compressed timetable that turns an accident into competitive pressure.

Your employees, and the day they find out

The people who work for you will learn about a sale in one of two ways: from you, in a sequence you planned, or from a rumour. The sequence – who is told, when, in what words, and what they are told about their own position – is designed with you before market, alongside the leak protocol, and rehearsed before the day it is needed. Key managers who must be inside the circle are brought in deliberately, with their own outcome in the transaction understood before they are asked to help sell it. Works councils, management retention and the board →

Inside our firm

A small number of mandates at a time. A named lead partner and a named second; access inside B2B is limited to the people the mandate needs. We do not publish client names, transaction details, or "success stories" without written consent. It's the same discretion you'll want when it's your name on the teaser.

Start without telling us who you are.

A first call needs no company name. If you want an NDA before you say anything at all, we sign yours first. Many owners start exactly there.

Book a call Write to a partner How disclosure is staged inside the process →