Case study · Everstone Succession Partners
How Tentt built a succession score that tells a search fund which owners to call first
Everstone Succession Partners needed to find founder-led businesses whose owners were starting to think about what comes next. We turned scattered directory, LinkedIn and website data into one ranked list.
- Search fund
- Owner-operator acquisition
- Data and scoring
- Cold outreach
3,500+
Company records combined and matched
869
Firms matched across both sources
58
Priority owners from the succession score
The transformation
From a pile of directories to a ranked list of owners ready to talk
Where they were
Rodrigue had industry directories and member lists covering thousands of firms. Every one looked the same on paper: a name, an address, a phone number. Finding the right owner meant working through them one by one.
The problem
A directory tells you a firm exists, not whether its founder is ready to step back. Working the list by hand would take months, most outreach would land on owners with no interest in selling, and the best targets could hear from a broker first.
Where we took them
One matched dataset, every founder scored for succession, and 58 priority owners ranked with a reason to reach out now. Rodrigue's outreach goes to the owners most likely to want the conversation, instead of everyone in the directory.
About the client
Everstone Succession Partners is the owner-operator search led by Rodrigue Djikeuchi. Backed by experienced search fund investors, Rodrigue is looking for one founder-led business to acquire and run for the long term, with an owner who wants their team, customers and reputation looked after.
Search funds live or die on sourcing. The right business is usually not for sale yet, and its owner is not announcing that they are thinking about retirement.
- Client
- Everstone Succession Partners
- Type
- Search fund, owner-operator
- Target
- Founder-led businesses planning succession
- What we built
- Succession score and priority outreach list
How we got them there
From thousands of records to a short list worth calling
Tentt rebuilt Everstone's go-to-market stack around one question: which owners are most likely to be thinking about succession right now?
- 1
Combine the sources
We pulled together two industry sources, a national directory and an association member list, into one dataset of more than 3,500 company records, then matched them company by company so each firm appeared once with its offices, contacts and services.
- 2
Score every founder for succession
We built a custom succession score for every founder, using data scraped from their LinkedIn profiles and insights from their company websites, so each owner could be ranked by how likely they are to be thinking about succession.
- 3
Build the priority list
The score cut 869 matched firms down to 58 priority owners, ranked so Rodrigue always knew who to contact first and why.
- 4
Targeted outreach
With the list ranked, cold outreach went to the owners most likely to want a conversation, written around succession and legacy rather than a generic acquisition pitch.
The result
A ranked pipeline instead of a directory
Rodrigue went from a pile of directories to a short, ranked list of owners, each with a reason to reach out now.
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